INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 229
make reparations and reciprocal concessions; they forget injuries. The Santal, in his simple spirit, possesses a keen sense of justice, and if one attempts to force him, he prefers to leave the country; the people are virtuous; crimes, and magistrates charged with punishing them, are unknown. Among the Hos, who belong to the same group, it is sufficient that the honesty or the veracity of a man be suspected for him to kill himself. The Santals, the Leptchas, the Alfarons, the Jakuns, are hospitable, obliging, and beneficent; the Bodos, the Dhimals, the Hotchs, the Santals, the Leptchas, are monogamous, chaste, faithful; in general, daugh- ters and sons are equal. Among the Bodos and Dhimals, essen- tially peaceful, the priestly offices, contrary to Brahmanism, are not hereditary, but belong to all the elders. Among the Santals, however, two of the tribes are especially set apart to religion and furnish a great majority of the priests. Among them a betrothed woman abandons her clan and gods for those of her husband. A person passes easily from one clan to another, from one tribe to another. In a word, although there are limits and territorial boundaries for classes and tribes, these limits never assume the form of military frontiers; and, as has been seen, the external situation of these societies is correlative to their internal peaceful organizations, the moral elements of which have especially impressed observers, although that high morality rests primarily upon favorable economic conditions, and upon external conditions on the whole equally favorable.
Reclus says that, although the Santals are agriculturists, they are nevertheless nomads and love to change their place of abode. About two million of them inhabit the valleys of Behar and Bengal. Their moving about is explained, however, by the fact that when the soil they are cultivating is impoverished they move into the jungle to seek other land to be grubbed out. In some districts in which there were only 3,000 people in 1790, there were 200,000 in 1840, and, in spite of themselves, all the land being taken up, they had become sedentary. They had also come into contact with military societies. The Mongols and the English have made serfs of this peaceful and virtuous population, and the moving about that is seen among them now is only the
