The law of custom is always interwoven with religion, and is enforced by fear of earthly punishment for disobedience. This fear is strongest among patriarchal races whose religion is founded upon the worship of ancestors. To depart from the customs of the ancestors is to insult the tribal god, and it is therefore the business of each member of the tribe to see to it that the impiety of his fellow-tribesmen brings no judgment down upon his head. In such a community a man is only free from the tyranny of custom when he dies. As in the German's ideal of a well-governed city, everything is forbidden. Hedged about by the tabu he can scarce move hand or foot without circumspection. If he errs, even unwittingly, the spirits of disease pounce upon him. In Tonga almost every day he performed the _Moe-moe_, an act of penance to atone for unconscious breaches of the tabu, and in the civil war of 1810 it was the practice to open the bodies of the slain to discover from the state of the liver whether the dead warrior had led a good or an evil life. Among the races held in bondage by custom there were, of course, rare souls born before their time in whom the eternal "Thou shalt not" of the law of custom provoked the question "Why?" But they met the fate ordained for men born before their time; in civilized states the hemlock, the cross and the stake; in uncivilized, the club or the spear. Perhaps the real complaint of the Athenians against Socrates was that an unceasing flow of wisdom and reproof is more than erring man can endure, but the published grounds for his condemnation were that he denied the gods recognized by the State, and that he corrupted the young. This, as William Mariner tells us, is what men whispered under their breath when Finau, the king of Vavau in the Friendly Islands, dared to scoff at the law of tabu in 1810, and he was struck down by sickness while ordering a rope to be brought for the strangling of his priest. In fact the reformers of primitive races never lived long: if they were low-born they were clubbed and that was the end of them and their reforms; if they were chiefs, and something happened to them, either by disease or accident, men saw therein the finger of an offended deity, and obedience to the existing order of things became stronger than before.