If, now, we enquire, What are the earliest offences against which public action is taken? and why? we may remember that Mr. Hobhouse has stated them to be witchcraft and breaches of the marriage law; and that the punishment of those offences corresponds, as he has said, "roughly to our own administration of justice" (I, 81). Now, in the case of breaches of the marriage laws--mating with a cousin on the mother's side instead of with a cousin on the father's side, marrying into a forbidden class--it is obvious that there is no individual who has suffered injury and that there is no individual to experience resentment. It is the community that suffers or is expected to suffer; and it expects to suffer, because it, in the person of one of its {228} members, has offended. Collectively it is responsible for the misdeeds of its members. Whom, then, has it offended? To whom is it responsible? Who will visit it with punishment, unless it makes haste to set itself right? The answer given by a certain tribe of the Sea Dyaks makes the matter clear: they, Mr. St. John tells us in his _Life in the Forests of the Far East_ (I, 63, quoted by Westermarck, I, 49), "are of opinion that an unmarried girl proving with child must be offensive to the superior powers, who, instead of always chastising the individual, punish the tribe by misfortunes happening to its members. They therefore on the discovery of the pregnancy fine the lovers, and sacrifice a pig to propitiate offended heaven, and to avert that sickness or those misfortunes that might otherwise follow." That is, of course, only one instance. But we may safely say that the marriage law is generally ascribed to the ordinance of the gods, even in the lowest tribes, and that breaches of it are offences against heaven. It is unnecessary to prove, it need only be mentioned, that witchcraft is conspicuously offensive to the religious sentiment, and is punished as an offence against the god or gods. When, then, we consider the origin and nature of justice, not from {229} an abstract and _à priori_ point of view, but in the light of historic fact, so far from finding that it originates and operates in complete independence of religion, we discover that from the beginning the offences with which the justice of the primitive community deals are offences, not against the community, but against heaven. "In the evolution of public justice," as Mr. Hobhouse says, "at the outset the community interferes mainly on what we may call supernatural grounds." From the beginning misdeeds are punished, not merely as wrongs done to society, but as wrong done to the gods and as wrong-doing for which the community collectively is responsible to the gods. Justice from the beginning is not individual resentment, but "public action taken for the public safety." It is not, as Mr. Hobhouse calls it, "revenge guided and limited by custom." It is the customary action of the community taken to avert divine vengeance.