of personal independence and the devotion of man to man. The progress of society, says Sir Henry Maine, has been from communal restraint to personal freedom. Both of these apparently conflicting statements are true. The personal independence of which M. Guizot speaks is the communal equality of fellow-clansmen, an independence which each possesses not because he is a man but because he is a clansman, an independence which, far from implying any "offhangingness" from the group, simply results from the union of the individual with his group. On the other hand, the personal independence in which Sir Henry Maine sees the latest outcome of a slow and fitful evolution is one which (to apply an expression of Savigny) draws a circle round each individual as distinct from his group and the government of his group, an independence which sets him apart from every tie of kinship in an isolation which primitive socialism would have contemplated and treated as a terrible calamity—the isolation of the clanless and the lordless man.
§ 37. Over and above the choral song-dances of the clan, over and above communal hymns of all descriptions, we shall therefore be prepared to find some sort of personal poetry in clan life. Moreover, it need not surprise us if such poetry should give the clearest insight into clan sentiments, for it is evidently in the relation of the clansman to his group that such sentiments are most distinctly expressed. Self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of the clan, uncompromising vengeance for the blood of slaughtered kinsfolk, justice in the distribution of the common property, faithfulness in the discharge of funeral obsequies—these and such as these are the ideal characteristics of the clansman; and clearly they may be best illustrated where conditions of climate and soil have allowed the largest personal freedom compatible with a
