In Australia, where there is very little war, this organization is mostly wanting.

In North America, on the other hand, amongst the more advanced and warlike tribes, we find regular tribal officers, and some approach to a political constitution.
Yet in Australia there is at least one occasion when a sort of tribal gathering takes place--namely, when their elaborate ceremonies for the initiation of the youths is being held.
It would seem, however, that these ceremonies are, as often as not, intertribal rather than tribal.

So similar are the customs and beliefs over wide areas, that groups with apparently little or nothing else in common will assemble together, and take part in proceedings that are something like a Pan-Anglican Congress and a World's Fair rolled into one.

To this indefinite type of intertribal association the term "nation" is sometimes applied.

Only when there is definite organization, as never in Australia, and only occasionally in North America, as amongst the Iroquois, can we venture to describe it as a genuine "confederacy." No doubt the reader's head is already in a whirl, though I have perpetrated endless sins of omission and, I doubt not, of commission as well, in order to simplify the glorious confusion of the subject of the social organization prevailing in what is conveniently but loosely lumped together as totemic society.