In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the
sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at
this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the
victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer
to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of
slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine
myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a
mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the
earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger
than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful
instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter
of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.
In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up
only a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--the
others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction
than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai
tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. "The
aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving
an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp" (Fison and
Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted
to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so
inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called
upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the
words of Professor Robertson Smith (281):
"Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the
women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization,
still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a
promise not to commit child-murder."
Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their
custom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90)
relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in
1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a single
female child could be found. The British Government rescued a number
of girls and brought them up, giving them an education. Some of these
were afterward given in marriage to respectable Kandh bachelors,
"and it was expected that they at least would not outrage
their own feeling as mothers by consenting to the
destruction of their offspring. Subsequently, however,
Colonel Campbell ascertained that these ladies had no female
children, and, on being closely questioned, they admitted
that at their husbands' bidding they had destroyed them."
In the South Sea Islands "not less than two-thirds of the children
were murdered by their own parents." Ellis (_P.R_., I., 196-202) knew
parents who had, by their own confession, killed four, six, eight,
even ten of their children, and the only reason they gave was that it
was the custom of the country.
"_No sense of irresolution or horror appeared to exist_ in
the bosoms of those parents, who deliberately resolved on
the deed before the child was born." "The murderous parents
often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost before
their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and
spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or
with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs
over the persuasions of their teachers."
They refused to spare babies even when the missionaries offered to
take care of them (II., 23). Neither Ellis, during a residence of
eight years, nor Nott during thirty years' residence on the South Sea
Islands, had known a single mother who was not guilty of this crime of
infanticide. Three native women who happened to be together in a room
one day confessed that between them they had killed twenty-one
infants--nine, seven, and five respectively.
These facts have long been familiar to students of anthropology, but
their true significance has been obscured by the additional
information that many tribes addicted to infanticide, nevertheless
displayed a good deal of "affection" toward those whom they spared. A
closer examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is no
true affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for the
little ones, chiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification it
affords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent to
inherited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only in
self-sacrifice; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for their
children is the one quality most lacking in these child-murderers.
Sentimentalists, with their usual lack of insight and logical sense,
have endeavored to excuse these assassins on the ground that necessity
compelled them to destroy their infants. Their arguments have misled
even so eminent a specialist as Professor E.B. Tylor into declaring
(_Anthropology,_ 427) that "infanticide comes from hardness of life
rather than from hardness of heart." What he means, may be made clear
by reference to the case of the Arabs who, living in a desert country,
were in constant dread of suffering from scarcity of food; wherefore,
as Robertson Smith remarks (281), "to bury a daughter was regarded not
only as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible if
the reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe."
This explains the murders in question but does not show them to be
excusable; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishness
and hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infants
than restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the children
they could provide for.
In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as much
semblance of an excuse as the Arabs. Turner relates (284) that in the
New Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposed
that they could not attend to more than two or three, all the others
were buried alive; in other words the babes were murdered to save
trouble and allow the men to live in indolence. In the instances from
India referred to above, various trivial excuses for female
infanticide were offered: that it would save the expenses connected
with the marriage rites; that it was cheaper to buy girls than to
bring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes; that
male births are increased by the destruction of female infants; and
that it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them
to grow up and become causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians,
says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide "no admixture of
anything like religious feeling or fear, but _merely whim, expediency,
anger, or indolence_." Sometimes the general idea of woman's
inferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleading
missionary: "Why should she live? Will she wield a club? Will she
poise a spear?"
But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide
reached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their children
because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; or
because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to
suffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because they
liked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no other
reason than because they could not make them stop crying. So they
buried them alive though they might be months or even years old
(Ellis, _P.R_., IV., 240).
These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardness
of heart"--sensual, selfish indulgence--that smothers the parental
instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be
a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the
scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring.
In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a
rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point
because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge
and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of
romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings.
But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on that
there are other things in which animals are superior not only to
savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.