The voice of the town crier awakens one to the fact that here is the striking apparatus of some sort of a social clock. It will be found that there is an organization of which the crier is the ultimate utterance. Chiefs are there in abundance, the house chief, the kiva chief, the war chief, the speaker chief who is the crier; chiefs of clans, who are chiefs of the fraternities: all these are members of the council that rules the pueblo. The council meets on occasion and acts for the common weal, and the village chief publishes their mandates by crier. In this most democratic organization the agents of the Government who wish to treat with the Hopi, not finding a responsible head, felt forced to appoint one. Thus each Hopi pueblo received a supreme ruler, who neither deceived himself nor the people as to the power he acquired from Washington, which was nil. The true rulers are the heads of the clans, and by their wise advice and their knowledge of the traditional unwritten laws everything is regulated for the tractable Hopi. Each pueblo acts for itself and knows nothing and cares less for the doings of the other pueblos, so there has never been a league of Hopi tribes. In a few instances there was a temporary unity of action, as when the people of other pueblos destroyed Awatobi, an event related circumstantially in the tradition. (See p. 210.) Traces of this independence of action abound in the Southwest. The ancient ruins show that the clans built each its house cluster apart from the others and moved when it liked. The present villages are made up of clans and fragments of clans, each living in the ward where it settled when it joined the others in the old time. These clans are larger families of blood relations, who trace their descent from the mother and who have a general family name or totem, as Eagle, Tobacco Plant, Cloud, etc. Although no blood relationship may be traceable between them, no youth and maid of the same clan may marry, and this seems to be the first law of the clan. The working of the strange law of mother-right makes the children of no clan relation to the father. Since the woman owns the house and the children, the father is only a sojourner in the clan of his wife. Another law of the greater family was that of mutual help, providing for the weak, infirm, and unprotected members. From this grows the hospitality of the Indian, and nowhere does this graceful custom prevail more than among the Hopi.