Many striking pages could be written about the harmony which prevails in the villages of the Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific Islands.  But they belong to a more advanced stage of civilization.  So we shall now take our illustrations from the far north.  I must mention, however, before leaving the Southern Hemisphere, that even the Fuegians, whose reputation has been so bad, appear under a much better light since they begin to be better known.  A few French missionaries who stay among them “know of no act of malevolence to complain of.”  In their clans, consisting of from 120 to 150 souls, they practise the same primitive communism as the Papuas; they share everything in common, and treat their old people very well.  Peace prevails among these tribes.(24) With the Eskimos and their nearest congeners, the Thlinkets, the Koloshes, and the Aleoutes, we find one of the nearest illustrations of what man may have been during the glacial age.  Their implements hardly differ from those of palaeolithic man, and some of their tribes do not yet know fishing:  they simply spear the fish with a kind of harpoon.(25) They know the use of iron, but they receive it from the Europeans, or find it on wrecked ships.  Their social organization is of a very primitive kind, though they already have emerged from the stage of “communal marriage,” even under the gentile restrictions.  They live in families, but the family bonds are often broken; husbands and wives are often exchanged.(26) The families, however, remain united in clans, and how could it be otherwise?  How could they sustain the hard struggle for life unless by closely combining their forces?  So they do, and the tribal bonds are closest where the struggle for life is hardest, namely, in North-East Greenland.  The “long house” is their usual dwelling, and several families lodge in it, separated from each other by small partitions of ragged furs, with a common passage in the front.  Sometimes the house has the shape of a cross, and in such case a common fire is kept in the centre.  The German Expedition which spent a winter close by one of those “long houses” could ascertain that “no quarrel disturbed the peace, no dispute arose about the use of this narrow space” throughout the long winter.  “Scolding, or even unkind words, are considered as a misdemeanour, if not produced under the legal form of process, namely, the nith-song."(27) Close cohabitation and close interdependence are sufficient for maintaining century after century that deep respect for the interests of the community which is characteristic of Eskimo life.  Even in the larger communities of Eskimos, “public opinion formed the real judgment-seat, the general punishment consisting in the offenders being shamed in the eyes of the people."(28)