As an example of the practice of unrestricted vendetta, we may cite the case of the Montenegrins.[8] This little people, up to quite recent years, practised a collective and hereditary vendetta, which continued from generation to generation, until the number of victims on both sides was equal, or until a blood-price of ten sequins was accepted by the feud-weary relatives of the original victim. Again, in Sardinia,[9] until the close of the eighteenth century, a collective hereditary feud followed a single act of murder, and hundreds of lives were lost in a single year. In Corsica,[10] in the eighteenth century, the vendetta-system caused the loss of a thousand lives each year: whole villages were depopulated: houses became fortresses where armed men lay in wait, hungry for vengeance, while the women tilled the fields. A similar barbarous blood-thirst was prevalent in Sicily,[11] in Calabria,[11] and in Albania,[12] up to quite recent times. The establishment of an improved system of government and the operation of disciplinary penalties have fortunately checked and must ultimately abolish so hideous a mode of vengeance. These peoples of the Mediterranean area are probably, as Ridgeway holds,[13] the racial descendants of the old Pelagasian race. For this, and for other reasons, there is a tendency to assume that the Pelasgians followed this system of blood-vendetta. But we hope to show that this view is probably incorrect, and that it is much more applicable to the Greece of post-Achaean days, that is, from 1000 B.C. to 750 B.C. than to the Greece of Achaean and pre-Achaean times.