Now the legal duel is an advance on the collective bear-fight, if only because it brings home to the individual perpetrator of the crime that he will have to answer for it.  Cranz, the great authority on the Eskimo of Greenland, naively remarks that a Greenlander dare not murder or otherwise wrong another, since it might possibly cost him the life of his best friend.  Did the Greenlander know that it would probably cost him his own life, his sense of responsibility, we may surmise, might be somewhat quickened.  On the other hand, duelling is not a satisfactory way of redressing the balance, since it merely gives the powerful bully an opportunity of adding a second murder to the first.  Hence the ordeal marks an advance in legal evolution.  A good many Australian peoples, for example, have reached the stage of requiring the murderer to submit to a shower of spears or boomerangs at the hands of the aggrieved group, on the mutual understanding that the blood-revenge ends here.

Luckily, however, for the murderer, it often takes time to bring him to book; and angry passions are apt in the meanwhile to subside.  The ruder savages are not so bloodthirsty as we are apt to imagine.  War has evolved like everything else; and with it has evolved the man who likes fighting for its own sake.  So, in place of a life for a life, compensation—­“pacation,” as it is technically termed—­comes to be recognized as a reasonable quid pro quo.  Constantly we find custom at the half-way stage.  If the murderer is caught soon, he is killed; but if he can stave off the day of justice, he escapes with a fine.  When private property has developed, the system of blood-fines becomes most elaborate.  Amongst the Iroquois the manslayer must redeem himself from death by means of no less than sixty presents to the injured kin; one to draw the axe out of the wound, a second to wipe the blood away, a third to restore peace to the land, and so forth.  According to the collective principle, the clansmen on one side share the price of atonement, and on the other side must tax themselves in order to make it up.  Shares are on a scale proportionate to degrees of relationship.  Or, again, further nice calculations are required, if it is sought to adjust the gross amount of the payment to the degree of guilt.  Hence it is not surprising that, when a more or less barbarous people, such as the Anglo-Saxons, came to require a written law, it should be almost entirely taken up by regulations about blood-fines, that had become too complicated for the people any longer to keep in their heads.