responsible for and to his fellow men and women who belong to the same community, and the naturally strong instinct of hospitality, joined with the knowledge that the stranger within the gates belongs to a whole set of people who will make palaver if anything happens to him, looks well after the safety of wanderers in Negro land. The bad point is, of course that the system is cumbersome, and, moreover, it tends, with the operation of the general African law of mutterrecht, the tracing of descent through females, to prevent the building up of great families. For example, you have a great man, wise, learned, just, and so on; he is esteemed in his generation, but at his death his property does not go to the sons born to him by one of his wives, who is a great woman of a princely line, but to the eldest son of his sister by the same mother as his own. This sister's mother and his own mother was a slave wife of his father's; this, you see, keeps good blood in a continual state of dilution with slave blood. The son he has by his aristocratic wife may come in for the property of her brother, but her brother belongs to a different family, so he does not take up his father's greatness and carry it on with the help his father's wealth could give him in the father's family. I do not say the system is unjust or anything like that, mind; I merely say that it does not tend to the production of a series of great men in one family.
Nevertheless, when once you have mastered the simple fundamental rules that underlie the native African idea of property they must strike you as just, elaborately just; and there is another element of simplicity in the thing, and that is that all forms of property are subject to the same law, land, women, china basons, canoes, slaves, it matters not what, there is the law.
