When one gens charges crime against a member of another, it can of its
own motion proceed only to retaliation. To prevent retaliation, the
gens of the offender must take the necessary steps to disprove the
crime, or to compound or punish it. The charge once made is held as
just and true until it has been disproved, and in trial the cause of
the defendant is first stated. The anger of the prosecuting gens must
be placated.

In the tribal governments there are many institutions, customs, and
traditions which give evidence of a former condition in which society
was based not upon kinship, but upon marriage.

From a survey of the facts it seems highly probably that kinship
society, as it exists among the tribes of North America, has developed
from connubial society, which is discovered elsewhere on the globe. In
fact, there are a few tribes that seem scarcely to have passed that
indefinite boundary between the two social states. Philologic research
leads to the same conclusion.

Nowhere in North America have a people been discovered who have passed
beyond tribal society to national society based on property, i.e.,
that form of society which is characteristic of civilization. Some
peoples may not have reached kinship society; none have passed it.

Nations with civilized institutions, art with palaces, monotheism as
the worship of the Great Spirit, all vanish from the priscan condition
of North America in the light of anthropologic research. Tribes with
the social institutions of kinship, art with its highest architectural
development exhibited in the structure of communal dwellings, and
polytheism in the worship of mythic animals and nature-gods remain.