These savages are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings.
So far as their tribes can be said to have a political constitution,
it is a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and influential men,
who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the
practical exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly
answers to the senate of later times: if we had to coin a word for
such a government of elders we might call it a _gerontocracy._ The
elders who in aboriginal Australia thus meet and direct the affairs
of their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their
respective totem clans. Now in Central Australia, where the desert
nature of the country and the almost complete isolation from foreign
influences have retarded progress and preserved the natives on the
whole in their most primitive state, the headmen of the various
totem clans are charged with the important task of performing
magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, and as the
great majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it
follows that these men are commonly expected to provide the people
with food by means of magic.
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