the German straggler, captive or deserter could look forward to nothing save a violent death or a life of weary slavery. Mutual participation in danger must have given rise to mutual trust. ----- Footnote 472: This is not hypothetical or imaginary. The settlements in Iceland were positively made upon this principle, and by it the subsequent divisions of the land were regulated. ----- Again the principle upon which the settlement of the land was effected, was that of associations for common benefits, and a mutual guarantee of peaceful possession[473]. Each man stood engaged to his neighbour, both as to what he would himself avoid, and as to what he would maintain. The public weal was the immediate interest of every individual member of the state; it came home to him at every instant of his life, directly, pressing him either in his property, his freedom or his peace, not through a long and accidental chain of distant causes and results. Moreover in an association based upon the individual freedom of the associates, each man had a right to guard the integrity of the compact to which he was himself a party; and not only a right, but a strong interest in exercising it, for in proportion to the smallness of the state, is the effect which the conduct of any single member may produce upon its welfare. But wherever free men meet on equal terms of alliance, the will of the majority is the law of the state. If the minority be small it must submit, or suffer for rebellion: if large, and capable of independent action and subsistence, it may peaceably separate from the majority, renounce its intimate alliance, and emigrate to new settlements, where it may at its own leisure, and in its own way, develop its peculiar views of polity, leaving to fortune or to the gods to decide the abstract question of right between itself and its opponents. How then is the will of the majority to be ascertained? Where the number of citizens is small, the question is readily answered: by the decision of a public meeting at which all may be present. ----- Footnote 473: The Acts, if we may so call them, of an Anglosaxon parliament, are a series of _treaties of peace_, between all the associations which make up the state; a continual revision and renewal of the alliances offensive and defensive, of all the free men. They are universally mutual contracts for the maintenance of the frið or peace. Those who chose to do so, might withdraw from this contract, but they must take the consequence. The witan had no money to vote, except in very rare and extreme cases; consequently their business was confined to regulating the terms on which the frið could be maintained. -----