consisting of a number of judges appointed by the ruler. These held court daily in a special chamber of the palace. In addition, there seems to have been a special body of thirteen judges who sat with the ruler at stated periods for the review of unusually important cases. Finally, there was a grand chief justice who stood as the responsible head of the system. To what extent the subject cities and provinces shared in this system is not clear, but we are informed that their local courts were required to refer their decisions to the higher courts of Mexico City. For the earlier Maya we have very little data, but since their culture was of a high order and contributed liberally to the later Nahua, we may safely assume an almost equally complex system.
In the preceding chapter, we noted a striking similarity in the social organizations of Peru and Mexico in that their political complexes were built of gens-like units. Here we see that their judicial systems also were based upon these same units, for at the bottom were the courts or magistrates for the gens, subordinate to the magistrates of the governing gens. In the same way that a single warlike gens built up a political complex by subjecting other gens or groups of gens to its rule, it also erected a system of control and discipline. We may anticipate, therefore, that as we leave these centers of military culture we shall find little more than the separate individual gens systems. For example, south of Peru were the Araucans with a loose political system; and here we are told the "law of revenge" was supreme, that is, the individual was his own judge and executioner. Colombia and Ecuador doubtless had something of a judicial system, but elsewhere in South America we find only simple tribal groups where folk justice was free from all restraints.
Turning back to North America and beginning at the farthest north with the extremely simple culture of the Eskimo, we find a considerable body of regulations, as must be the case in any well-formed culture, but still no effective judicial machinery to enforce them. If a man finds his conventional rights trod upon, he has no recourse except to resort to blood vengeance. Yet, we do find some incipient judicial
