To which again China supplies a good parallel in

The growth of the mulberry tree follows its early bent.

ON CAUSATION.

If nothing touches the palm-leaves they do not rustle. (Oji.)

Nobody hates another without a cause. (Accra.)

A feather does not stick without gum. (A Pashto proverb.)

Again, the Turkish proverb, that curses, like chickens, come home to

roost, or the Italian one that, like processions, they come back to

their starting-point, is well matched by the Yoruba proverb that ‘ashes

fly back in the face of their thrower.’ Or the tendency of travellers

to exaggerate or tell lies, impressed as it has been on all human

experience, is also confirmed by the Oji proverb, that ‘he who travels

alone tells lies.’ And the universal belief in the ultimate exposure

of falsehood conveyed in such proverbs as the Arabian, ‘The liar is

short-lived;’ the Persian, ‘Liars have bad memories;’ or the still

more expressive Italian saying, that ‘the liar is sooner caught than a

cripple,’ finds itself corroborated by the Wolof proverb, that ‘lies,

though many, will be caught by Truth as soon as she rises up.’ Even in

Afghanistan, where it is said that no disgrace attaches to lying _per

se_, and where lying is called an honest man’s wings, while truth can

only be spoken by a strong man or a fool, there is also a proverb with

the moral, that the career of falsehood is short.[124]

That ‘hope is the pillar of the world,’ that ‘it is the heart which

carries one to hell or heaven,’ or that ‘preparation is better than

after-thought’—all experiences of the Kanuri, a Moslem tribe, who

think it a personal adornment to cut each side of their face in twenty

places—shows that there is no necessary connection between general

savagery and an absence of moral culture. The natives of New Zealand,

with all their barbarity, had in common use a saying which were a

desirable maxim for European diplomacy: ‘When you are on friendly terms,

settle your disputes in a friendly way; when you are at war, redress

your injuries by violence.’[125] Even the Fijians would say that an

unimproved day was not to be counted, and that no food was ever cooked by

gay clothes and frivolity.[126] A good Ashantee proverb warns people not

to speak ill of their benefactors, by forbidding them to call a forest a

shrubbery that has once given them shelter. The proverbs already quoted

from Yoruba teach the same lesson, nor would it be difficult to add many

more, all proving the existence among savages of a morality identical

in its main features with that of the higher group of nations to which

we ourselves belong, interpenetrated as it has been for ages with the

philosophies and religions of the civilised East.

A similar testimony to the intellectual powers of savages is afforded by

their proverbs, though of course the argument is only a suggestive one

from tribes whose language has been well studied to others not so well

known. That the Soudan negroes are on a higher level of general culture

than many savages of other islands or continents is proved by the fact

that all known Africans are acquainted with the art of smelting iron and

converting it into weapons and utensils; so that they may be said to be

living in the iron age, and thus, materially at least, are more advanced

than the Botocudos of Brazil, who are still in the age of polished stone

implements. From the fact alone that the Yorubas express their contempt

for a stupid man by saying that he cannot count nine times nine, we are

enabled at once to place them above tribes whose powers of numeration

fall short of such readiness. Hence we should not be justified in

expecting to find among Australian or American aborigines proverbs of so

high an intellectual order as abound in Africa, of which the following

may be selected as samples:—

Were no elephant in the jungle the buffalo would be large;

or—

The dust of the buffalo is lost in that of the elephant.

A crab does not bring forth a bird.

Two small antelopes beat a big one.

Two crocodiles do not live in one hole.

A child can crush a snail, but not a tortoise.

A razor cannot shave itself.

You cannot stop the sun by standing before it.

If you like honey, do not fear the bees.

When a fish is killed its tail is inserted in its own mouth.

(Said of people who reap the reward of their deeds.)

The Zulus, speaking of the uncertainty of a result, say, ‘It is not

known what calf the cow will have;’[127] and when the Fantees tell you

to ‘cross the river before you abuse the crocodile,’[128] there is no

difficulty in translating their meaning into English. In all these

proverbs it is obvious how the facts of every-day life have readily

served everywhere as the basis of intellectual advancement, and how

similar lessons have everywhere been drawn from the observation of

similar occurrences.

Leaving now the analogy between African and European proverb-lore,

which the uniformity of moral experiences and the observation of similar

laws of nature sufficiently account for, let us endeavour to find among

civilised nations any proverbs which, by the figures involved in them

or their likeness to savage maxims, seem to bear a distinct impression

of a barbaric coinage. One French proverb may almost certainly be so

explained. It is, for instance, well known that the lower races very

generally account for eclipses of either sun or moon by supposing them

to be the victims of the fury or voracity of some ill-disposed animal,

whom they try to divert by every horrible noise they can produce, or by

any weapon they have learnt to fashion. A typical instance of this was

the belief of the Chiquitos of South America that the moon was hunted

across the sky by dogs, who tore her in pieces when they caught her, till

driven off by the Indian arrows. It has been suggested that the French

proverb, ‘Dieu garde la lune des loups,’ said in deprecation of a dread

of remote danger, is a survival of a similar rude philosophy of nature

which is still prevalent in the capital of Turkey, and in the days of St.

Augustine was current over Europe.[129]

Another instructive set of proverbs may be adduced to show how the social

philosophy current in the savage state may survive in contemporary

expressions of modern Europe. In Africa, where, speaking generally, a

man’s wife has no better status in society than that which attaches to

his slave or his ox, and a son has been known to wager his own mother

against a cow, we cannot be astonished at finding in vogue proverbs

strongly depreciatory of the worth of the female sex. Thus a wise Kanuri

is cautioned, that if a woman shall speak to him two words, he shall take

one and leave the other; nor should he give his heart to a woman, if he

would live, for a woman never brings a man into the right way. So, too,

Pashto proverbs say contemptuously, that a woman’s wisdom is under her

heel, and that she is well only in the house or in the grave. The same

feeling is endorsed by the Persians, who declare that both women and

dragons are best out of the world, classing the former with horses and

swords among their by-words of unfaithfulness.

The literatures of all countries are strongly tinged with sentiments

of the same unjust nature. Even the French say that a man of straw is

worth a woman of gold, though their proverb, ‘Ce que femme veut, Dieu le

veut,’ is as true as it is a witty variation of the well-known democratic

formula. The Italians have made the shrewd observation, that, whilst with

men every mortal sin is venial, with women every venial sin is mortal;

but no language has anything worse than this, that as both a good horse

and a bad horse need the spur, so both a good woman and a bad woman need

the stick.

It is, however, in Germany that the character of women has suffered most

from the shafts of that other half of the community, which (it might be

complained) has as unfair a monopoly of making proverbs as it has of

making laws. The humorous saying, that there are only two good women in

the world, one of whom is dead and the other not to be found, contains

the key to the common national sentiment. A woman is compared to good

fortune in her partiality for fools, and to wine in her power to make

them. Like a glass, she is in hourly danger; and, like a priest, she

never forgets. Her vengeance is boundless, and her mutability finds its

only parallel in nature in the uncertain skies of April. Her affections

change every moment, like luck at cards, the favour of princes, or the

leaves of a rose; and though you will never find her wanting in words,

there is not a needle-point’s difference betwixt her yea and her nay.

She only keeps silence where she is ignorant, and it is as fruitless to

try to hold a woman at her word as an eel by its tail. Her advice, like

corn sown in summer, may perhaps turn out well once in seven years; but

wherever there is mischief brewing in the world, rest assured that there

is a woman and a priest at the bottom of it. Every daughter of Eve would

rather be beautiful than good, and may be caught as surely by gold as a

hare by dogs or a gentleman by flattery. Even in the house she should

be allowed no power, for where a woman rules the devil is chief servant;

whilst two women in the same house will agree together like two cats over

a mouse or two dogs over a bone.

Spanish experience on this subject coincides with the Teutonic, but

without the expenditure of nearly so much spleen, and with several

glimpses of a happier experience. What can be worse than this: ‘Beware of

a bad woman, nor put any trust in a good one;’ or sadder than this: ‘What

is marriage, mother? Spinning, childbirth, and crying, daughter’? Yet the

Spanish woman, as hard to know as a melon, as little to be trusted as a

magpie, as fickle as the wind or as fortune, as ready to cry as a dog to

limp, in labour as patient as a mule, is not so destitute as the German

of any redeeming qualities for her failings. The Spaniard is taught to

believe that with a good wife he may bear any adversity, and that he

should believe nothing against her unless absolutely proved. It is also

in remarkable contrast to the experiences of other countries, that in

Spain it should have passed into a proverb, that whilst an unmarried man

advocates a daily beating for a wife, as soon as he marries he takes care

of his own.

Female talkativeness appears also to be a subject of lament all over the

world, from our own island, where a woman’s tongue proverbially wags like

a lamb’s tail, to the Celestial Empire, where it is likened to a sword,

never suffered by its owner to rust. Regard not a woman’s words, says the

Hindoo; and the African also is warned against trusting his secrets even

to his wife. The Spaniard believes that he has only to tell a woman what

he would wish to have published in the market-place; and all languages

have sayings to the same effect. The Scotch divine who, before the

Session, defended his heresy that women would find no place in heaven,

by the text, ‘There was silence in heaven for about the space of half an

hour,’ only expressed a sentiment of universal currency over the world.

The proverbs collected from the lower races are still very few, when

compared with the immense mass of those from nations with whose

literature we are more familiar. It is in the nature of things that

missionaries and travellers should have been first struck by, and first

given us information about, matters more directly challenging their

notice than phrases in common use, for a real knowledge of which the most

favourable conditions of a prolonged intimacy are obviously requisite.

The large collection of such proverbs from West Africa alone, revealing

as they do an elevation of feeling and a clearness of intelligence which

other facts of their social life would never have led us to suspect,

point at the possibility of such collections elsewhere largely modifying

our present views concerning other savage tribes. They at least should

teach us caution against accepting the conclusions which some writers

have drawn from their study of savage languages, when, from the absence

or loss in a dialect of such words as ‘love’ or ‘gratitude,’ they

proceed to explain, on the hypothesis of degradation, that rude state

of existence which is denoted by the word ‘savage,’ and which there

are abundant reasons for supposing was really the primitive germ, out

of which all subsequent civilisation has been unfolded. ‘Were,’ says

Archbishop Trench, ‘the savage the primitive man, we should then find

savage tribes furnished, scantily enough it might be, with the elements

of speech, yet, at the same time, with its fruitful beginnings, its

vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close

inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant

and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of

degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage—more fearful,

perhaps, even than that which is stamped upon his form.’[130] Yet,

whatever may be the case with some tribes, who may be shown historically

to have fallen from a higher state (and such are the exceptions), at

least the languages spoken in Africa bear no such ‘fearful impress of

degradation’ as are declared to be traceable _in every case_, if we may

judge of a language by the thoughts which it expresses rather than by the

words which it contains.

IV.

_SAVAGE MORAL PHILOSOPHY._

Lucretius, in his retrospect of prehistoric times, imagines primeval man

as unpossessed of any moral law, and is at pains to explain how, as men

were once ignorant of the property of either fire to warm or of skins to

cover them, so once there was a time when no moral restraints affected

the relations between man and man.[131] Across the Atlantic we find the

same strain of thought in the myths, common in many different stages of

progress, of those culture heroes who had come long ago to teach men the

arts and virtues of life, and had left their names to be worshipped by a

grateful posterity. The Peruvian legend, that moral law was unknown until

the Sun sent two of his children to raise humanity from their animal

condition, coincides with the modern hypothesis that the morality of the

cave-men resembled very much that of the cave-bear; so that it becomes a

subject worthy of inquiry whether any human communities ever have lived,

or are actually living, with no more idea of moral right and wrong than

is necessary for the social harmony of a wolf-pack or a wasp’s nest;

whether, in short, what to the Roman was a matter of speculation, or to

the American of legend, can fairly become for us one of science.

The Shoshones of North America, some of whom are said to have built

absolutely no dwellings, but to have lived in caves and among the rocks,

or burrowed like reptiles in the ground; or the Cochinis, who resorted

at night for shelter to caverns and holes in the ground, may be taken as

the best representatives of the ancient cave-dwellers, and the nearest

known approach to communities living in the state presupposed by the

legends of most latitudes.[132] Californians generally are said to have

had ‘no morals, nor any religion worth calling such;’ yet even the

Shoshones knew, like so many other American tribes, how to ratify either

a treaty or a bargain by the ceremony of smoking, and used shell-money

as an instrument of barter. But some moral notions must enter into the

rudest kind of barter, and barter was known to the ancient cave-dwellers

of Périgord, just as it is to the lowest contemporary savage tribes.

Rock crystal and Atlantic shells, found among the remains of men, tigers,

and bears, in the caves of Périgord, could, it is argued, only have got

thither by barter; so that the earliest human beings we have record

of must have possessed at least so much morality as is necessary for

commerce.[133]

As regards existing savages, evidence as to their moral ideas can only be

sought in incidental allusion to their customs, penalties, beliefs, or

myths, never in chapters expressly devoted to the delineation of their

moral character. Not only do such delineations by different writers

conflict hopelessly with one another, but inconsistencies abound in the

accounts of the same writer, as, for instance, where Cranz describes

Greenlanders as mild and peaceable, and a few pages further on as

‘naturally of a murderous disposition.’ The value of Cranz’ evidence is

marred by the fact that he writes expressly to rebut the Deistic idea of

a natural morality existing by the light of reason and independent of

Revelation; and the evidence of other writers, whenever a long residence

among savages entitles them to speak with any authority at all, is spoilt

by their several temptations to bias. Whether the temptation be to

enliven a book of travel, to inculcate the need and enhance the merit of

missionary labours, or to illustrate the uniformity of moral perceptions

and the universality of certain moral laws, in any case we are exposed

to the error of mistaking for habitual what is really peculiar, and of

misunderstanding the indications of facts which are as often anomalous as

they are illustrative.

The way, also, in which the love of theory may give rise to unjustifiable

credulity or even to absolute misstatement may be exemplified from the

common story of the Bushman who spoke with absolute unconcern of having

murdered his brother, or of the other Bushman who gave as an instance of

his idea of a good action, stealing some one else’s wife, and of a bad

one, losing in the same way his own. According to the original authority,

the Bushmen who were questioned, to test their intelligence, on a few

moral points, and especially on what they considered good actions and

what bad, belonged to a kraal of extremely poor, half-starved Bushmen,

seemingly ‘the outcasts of the Bushmen race;’ the interpreter, through

whom Burchell made his inquiries, said he could not make them understand

what he said, and to the specific question about good and bad actions

_they made no reply_, the missionary himself adding, as comment, that

‘their not understanding it must have been either pretended stupidity or

a wilful misrepresentation by the interpreter.’ This same interpreter is

suspected by Burchell, in the very same page, of such misrepresentation,

or of actual invention in respect of the story of the murder—a story

which, if true, adds the missionary, would have justified him in saying,

Here are men who know not right from wrong. Yet both these stories have

been quoted to exemplify the state of the moral destitution of the lower

races.[134]

The fear of incurring the ill-will of his fellow-beings or of those

invisible spirits disposed more or less hostilely towards him and

everywhere surrounding him, must have sufficed, even for prehistoric

man, to have marked out certain acts as less advisable than others, and

so far as wrong. The instinct to repel or revenge personal injuries, and

the instinct to appease the unknown forces of nature, neither of which,

be it assumed, acted less energetically in the past than the present,

must have always contributed to rank certain sets of actions as better to

be avoided. Personal or tribal well-being has probably always supplied

a sufficiently defined moral standard, sufficiently defended by real or

fanciful sanctions. So suggests theory; and in point of fact a savage

tribe is as difficult to find as it is to imagine, without a sense of a

difference in the quality of actions, arising from a difference in their

likely consequences to themselves.

The fear of revenge from a man’s survivors or from his ghost would at

any time tend to make homicide a prominent act of guilt. The vendetta,

sometimes carried out as much against a homicidal tiger or tree as

against a man, would scarcely ever be not dreaded by a human murderer;

and the associations are obvious and few between homicide as merely an

act to be avenged and a crime to be avoided. Even in instances where

bloodshed seems to have left but an external stain, affecting the hands

not the heart of the murderer, and calling simply for purification

by washing, the presence of a feeling of difference may be detected

between the killing of a man and the killing of a bear. But the dread of

vengeance from a murdered man’s ghost, which is said to have acted as a

check on murder among the Sioux Indians, or the dread of such vengeance

from the tutelary gods of the deceased, which is said to have acted as

a check on cannibalism in Samoa, points to the existence of prudential

restraints which are likely not to have been limited in their operation

to a tribe in America nor to an island in the Pacific.

But, besides spiritual terrors, secular punishment has a well-defined

place among savages, to check the extreme indulgence of hatred or

passion. It is doubtful whether any savage tribe is so indifferent to

the criminality of murder as to be destitute of customary penal laws to

prevent or punish it. These customs vary from the payment of a slight

compensation, payable either to the dead man’s family or to the tribal

chief, down to actual capital punishment. Among the Northern Californians

a few strings of shell-money compounded for the murder of a man, and

half a man’s price was paid for a woman; banishment from the tribe being

sometimes the penalty, death never.[135] Among the Kutchin tribes human

life was valued at forty beaver skins.[136] Even the Veddahs insist upon

compensation to survivors. The Tunguse Lapps, with whom homicide was a

brave rather than a shameful act, punished nevertheless a murderer with

blows, and compelled him to support the dead man’s relations.[137] In

some cases a slight penance was the only law against homicide. A Yuma

Indian, for instance, who killed a tribesman had perforce to starve for a

month on vegetables and water, bathing frequently during the day; whilst

a Pima who killed an Apache had to fast for sixteen days, living in the

woods, careful meanwhile to keep his eyes from the sight of a blazing

fire and his tongue from conversation.[138]

The custom, moreover, of extending to a whole family the guilt of an

individual is an additional protection to human life among savages. In

the same way as, till lately, English law avenged itself on the suicide

who had escaped its jurisdiction, by punishing the criminal’s relations,

savage custom satisfies indignation by taking any member of a family as a

substitute for a fugitive criminal. The Thlinkeet Indians, if they cannot

kill the actual murderer, kill one of his tribe or family instead.[139]

‘An Indian,’ says Kane, ‘in taking revenge for the death of a relative,

does not, in all cases, seek the actual offender; as, should the party

be one of his own tribe, any relative will do, however distant.’[140]

Catlin tells the story how, when a great Sioux warrior, the Little Bear,

had been shot by the Dog, the avengers of the former, failing to overtake

the Dog, caught and slew his brother instead, notwithstanding that he was

a man much esteemed by the tribe.[141] If a Californian criminal escaped

to a sacred refuge he was regarded as a coward, in that he diverted to

a relation a punishment he deserved himself.[142] In Samoa not only the

murderer but all his belongings would fly to another village as a city

of refuge, for in Samoan law a plaintiff might seek redress from ‘the

brother, son, or other relative of the guilty party.’[143] In Australia

wide-spread consternation followed the commission of a crime, especially

if the culprit escaped, for the brothers of the criminal held themselves

quite as guilty as he was, and only persons unconnected with the family

believed themselves safe.[144] In the Fiji Islands a warrior once left

his musket in such a position that it went off and killed two persons.

The owner of the musket was condemned to death; but, as he fled away, the

strangulation of his father instead of him perfectly satisfied the ends

of justice.[145]

The Samoans, as far back as it was possible to trace, had had customary

laws for the prevention of theft, adultery, assault, and murder, and

the penalties for such crimes appeared rather to have grown milder than

severer with time. Not only this, but they had penal customs for such

wrong acts as rude conduct to strangers, pulling down of fences, spoiling

fruit trees, or calling chiefs by opprobrious epithets. It is open to

doubt whether other savage tribes had not equally good safeguards for

preventing at least those greater social offences, whose immorality

furnishes the first principle of even the ethics of civilised communities.

In Fiji the criminality of actions is said to have varied with the social

rank of the offender, murder by a chief being accounted less heinous

than a petty larceny by a man of low rank. Theft, adultery, witchcraft,

violation of a _tabu_, arson, treason, and disrespect to a chief were

among the few crimes regarded as serious. With regard to murder, we are

told (and the passage is a favourite one for illustrating the extreme

variability of moral sentiment), that to a Fijian shedding of blood was

‘no crime, but a glory,’ and that to be an acknowledged murderer was

‘the object of his restless ambition.’ In a similar strain it has been

said, that in New Zealand intentional murder was either very meritorious

or of no consequence; the latter if the victim were a slave, the former

if he belonged to another tribe. The malicious destruction of a man of

the same tribe was, however, rare, the _lex talionis_ alone applying

to or checking it;[146] and it is probable that this reservation in

favour of native New Zealand should be made for all cases where murder

is spoken of as a trivial matter. Whenever murder is spoken of as no

crime, reference seems generally made to murder outside the tribe, so

that from the circumstances of savage life it resolves itself into an

act of ordinary hostility; or if the reference is to murder within the

tribe, it is to murder sanctioned by necessity, custom, or superstition.

The Carrier Indians, who did not think murders worth confessing when they

confessed other crimes of their lives, yet regarded the _murder of a

fellow-tribesman as something quite senseless_, and the man who committed

such a deed had to absent himself till he could pay the relatives,

since at home he was only safe if a chief lent him the refuge of his

tent or of one of his garments.[147] ‘A murder,’ says Sproat, ‘_if

not perpetrated on one of his own tribe_, or on a particular friend,

is no more to an Indian than the killing of a dog.’ The sutteeism and

parenticide, which missionaries describe as murders, are, from the

savage point of view, rather acts of mercy, being intimately connected

with their ideas of future existence, to which it is neither fair nor

scientific to apply the phraseology and associations of Christian

morality.[148]

Different tribes have evolved different institutions for the prevention

of wrongs, which supplement to a large extent the absence of fixed legal

remedies.

In Greenland there was the singing combat, in which anyone aggrieved,

dancing to the beat of a drum and accompanied by his partisans, recited

at a public meeting a satirical poem, telling ludicrous stories of his

adversary, and obliged to listen afterwards to similar abuse of himself,

till, after a long succession of charges and retorts, the assembled

spectators gave the victory to one of the combatants. These combats,

says Cranz, served to remind debtors of the duty of repayment, to brand

falsehood and detraction with infamy, to punish fraud and injustice,

and above all to overwhelm adultery with contempt. The fear of incurring

public disgrace at these combats was, with the fear of retaliation for

injury, the only motive to virtue which the writer allows to the natives

of Greenland.

In Samoa thieves could be scared from plantations by cocoa-nut leaflets

so plaited as to convey an imprecation; and a man who saw an artificial

sea-pike suspended from a tree would fear, that, if he accomplished his

theft, the next time he went fishing a real sea-pike would dart up and

wound him mortally. Images of a similar nature, conveying imprecations

of disease, death, lightning, or a plague of rats, seem also to have

been effective restraints upon thievish propensities;[149] and in the

Tonga Islands fruits and flowers were tabooed, that is, preserved,

by plaited representations of a lizard or a shark.[150] It is likely

that a similar meaning attached in Africa to certain branches of trees

which, stuck into the ground in a particular manner, with bits of broken

pottery, were enough to prevent the most determined robber from crossing

a threshold.[151] Similar _tabu_ marks were seen on some rocks at Tahiti,

placed there to prevent people fishing or getting shells from the Queen’s

preserves;[152] and it is possible that the origin of all _tabu_ customs

may have lain in the supposed efficacy of symbolical imprecation.

In New Zealand the institution of _muru_, or the legalized enforcement of

damages by plunder, extended the idea of sinfulness even to involuntary

wrongs or accidental sufferings. Involuntary homicide is said to have

involved more serious consequences than murder of malice prepense; and

if a man’s child fell into the fire, or his canoe was upset and himself

nearly drowned, he was not only cudgelled and robbed, but he would have

deemed it a personal slight not to have been so treated.[153] To escape

from drowning was indeed a common sin in savage life, for was it not to

escape the just wrath of the Water Spirit, and perhaps to turn it upon

some one else? In Kamschatka so heinous was the sin of cheating the Water

Spirit of his prey, by escape from drowning, that no one would receive

such a sinner into his house, speak to him, nor give him food: he became,

in short, socially dead. Fijians who escape shipwreck are supposed to

be saved in order to be eaten, and Williams tells, how on one occasion

fourteen of them who lost their canoe at sea only escaped becoming food

for sharks to become food for their friends on shore. If the Koossa

Kafirs see a person drowning, or indeed in any danger of his life, they

either run away from the spot or pelt the victim with stones as he

dies.[154] So also with death by fire: if an Indian falls into the fire

or is partially burnt, it is believed that the spirits of his ancestors

pushed him into the flames owing to his negligence in supplying them with

food.[155] The custom of an African tribe to expel from their community

anyone bitten by a zebra or an alligator, or even so much as splashed by

the tail of the latter, is evidently related to the same idea.[156]

Again, however much Catlin’s assertion that self-denial, torture,

and immolation were constant modes among North American Indians for

appealing to the Great Spirit for countenance and forgiveness, may

overstate the truth, it is remarkable that not only penance by fasting

and self-torture, but the practice of confession, should occur in the

lower culture as a mode of moral purification. Confession was common not

only in Mexico and Peru, but among widely remote savage tribes, being

closely connected with the belief in the power of sin to cause, and of

priestcraft to cure, dangerous sickness. The Carrier Indians of North

America thought, that the only chance of recovery from sickness lay in a

disclosure before a priest of every secret crime committed in life, and

that the concealment of a single fact would meet with the punishment of

instantaneous death.[157] The Samoan Islanders believing that all disease

was due to the wrath of some deity, would inquire of the village priest

the cause of sickness, who would sometimes in such cases command the

family to assemble and confess. At this confessional ceremony each member

of the family would confess his crimes, and any judgments he might have

invoked in anger on the family or the invalid himself; long-concealed

crimes being often thus disclosed.[158] In Yucatan, confession,

introduced by Cukulcan, the mythical author of their culture, was much

resorted to, ‘as death and disease were thought to be direct punishments

for sins committed.’ The natives of Cerquin, in Honduras, confessed, not

only in sickness, but in immediate danger of any kind, or to procure

divine blessings on any important occasion. So far did they carry it,

that, if a travelling party met a jaguar or puma, each would commend

himself to the gods, confessing loudly his sins, and imploring pardon; if

the beast still advanced they would cry out, ‘We have committed as many

more sins; do not kill us.’[159]

But over and above the wrong acts from which restraints lie in the

revenge of individuals, in punishment by the community, or in artificial

restrictions, there is a large class of acts, defended rather by

spiritual than secular sanctions, deriving their sinfulness from pure

misconceptions of things, and constituting for savages by far the larger

part of their field for right and wrong. The consciousness of having

trodden in the footstep of a bear would be as painful to a Kamschadal

as the consciousness of having stolen, the possible consequences of the

former being infinitely more dreadful. Such acts as the experience of

primitive times has thus generalized into acts provocative of unpleasant

expressions of dissatisfaction from the spiritual world, and so far

as sinful, become in the folk-lore of later date acts merely unlucky

or ominous. The feeling to this day prevalent in parts of England and

Germany, that if you transplant parsley you may cause its guardian spirit

to punish you or your relations with death, fairly illustrates how the

wrongful acts of bygone times may even in civilised countries continue to

be guarded by the very same sanction that gave them potency in the days

of savagery.

Of such regulations in restraint of the natural liberty of savage tribes

let it suffice to give some instances of sinful acts which derive all

their associations of wrong from rude notions concerning the nature of

storms, of ancestors, of names, and of animals. It will be seen that in

some cases such superstitions act as real checks to real wickedness;

though the connection between them seems purely accidental, rather than

the result of any intuitive discrimination of the qualities of actions.

As English sailors will refrain from whistling at sea, lest they should

provoke a storm, so the Kamschadals account many actions sinful on

account of their storm-breeding qualities. For this reason they will

never cut snow from off their shoes with a knife out of doors, nor go

barefooted outside their huts in winter, nor sharpen an axe or a knife

on a journey. The Fuejian natives brought away by Captain Fitzroy felt

sure that anything wrong said or done caused bad weather, especially the

sin of shooting young ducks. They declared their belief in an omniscient

Big Black Man, who had his living among the woods and mountains, and

influenced the weather according to men’s conduct; in illustration of

which they told a story of a murderer, who ascribed to the anger of

this being a storm of wind and snow which followed his crime.[160] In

Vancouver’s Island there is a mountain, the sin of mentioning which in

passing may cause a storm to overturn the offender’s canoe.[161]

Prominent among the moral checks of savage life is the fear of the

anger of the dead. Among savages the supposed wishes of their departed

friends, or deified forefathers, operate as real commands, girt with

all the sanction of superstitious terror, and clothing the most fanciful

customs with all the obligatory feelings of morality. A New Zealand

chief, for instance, would expect his dead ancestors to visit him with

disease or other calamity if he let food touch any part of his body,

or if he entered a dwelling where food hung from the ceiling.[162] The

wide prevalence of the feeling that disease and death are due to the

displeasure of the dead, who may return to earth, to reside in some part

of a living person’s body, may be illustrated by the Samoan custom of

taking valuable presents as a last expression of regard to the dying,

or by way of bribing them to forego their incorporeal privilege of

post-mortem revenge.[163] On the Gold Coast also friends make presents

to the dead of gold, brandy, or cloth, to be buried with them; just as

in ancient Mexico all classes of the population would beg of their dead

king to accept their offerings of food, robes, or slaves, which they vied

in giving him, or as the Mayas would place precious gifts or ornaments

near or upon the corpse of a deceased lord of a province. So the Bodos,

presenting food at the graves of their relations, would pray, saying,

‘Take and eat ... we come no more to you, come no more to us.’

Proper behaviour with regard to names is one of the most important points

of savage decorum. The confusion, amounting almost to identification,

between a person and his name is one of the most signal proofs of the

power of language over thought. As Catlin’s or Kane’s Indian pictures

were thought to detract from the originals something of their existence,

giving the painter such power over them that whilst living their bodies

would sympathise with every injury done to their pictures, and when dead

would not rest in their graves, so the feeling among savages is strong

that the knowledge of a person’s name gives to another a fatal control

over his destiny. An Indian once asked Kane ‘whether his wish to know

his name proceeded from a desire to steal it;’[164] whilst with the

Abipones it was positively sinful for anyone to pronounce his own name.

Kane could only discover Indians’ names through third parties; and it

is curious that the natives of one of the Fiji Islands will never tell

their names to an inquirer, if there should be anyone else to answer the

question.[165] Hence it is that the highest compliment a savage can pay a

person is to exchange names with him, a custom which Cook found prevalent

at Tahiti and in the Society Islands, and which was also common in North

America.[166] Warriors sometimes take the name of a slain enemy, from

the same motive apparently which, in some instances, is an inducement to

eat their flesh, namely, to appropriate their courage. The Lapps change a

child’s baptismal name, if it falls ill, rebaptizing it at every illness,

as if they thought to deceive the spirit that vexed it by the simple

stratagem of an _alias_;[167] and the Californian Shoshones, in changing

their names after such feats as scalping an enemy, stealing his horses,

or killing a grizzly bear, had, perhaps, some similar idea of avoiding

retaliation. Among the Chinook Indians near relations often changed their

names, lest the spirits of the dead should be drawn back to earth by

often hearing familiar names used.

With these ideas about names it is easy to understand how especial

reverence would become attached to the names of kings or dead persons

whose power to punish a light use of their appellations might well be

deemed exceptional. On accessions to royalty in the Society Islands all

words resembling the king’s name were changed, and any person bold enough

to continue the use of the superseded terms was put to death, with all

his relations.[168] From a similar state of thought the Abipones invented

new words for all things whose previous names recalled a dead person’s

memory, whilst to mention his name was ‘a nefarious proceeding.’[169] In

Dahome the king’s name must be pronounced with bated breath, and it is

death to utter it in his presence.[170] The degrees of guilt, attached

to the mention of a dead person, arising from a belief in the power of

spoken names to call back their owners, vary in sinfulness from its being

a positive crime, punishable by fine, to a mere rudeness, to be checked

in the young. Among the Northern Californians it was one of the most

strenuous laws that whoever mentioned a dead person’s name should be

liable to a heavy fine, payable to the relatives.[171] The tribe of Ainos

held it a great rudeness to speak of the dead by their names; whilst

young Ahts are instantly checked, if they make an unthinking use of the

name of a chief that has been relinquished in memory of some event of

importance.[172]

Several causes may have led to animal worship. The tendency to call men

by qualities or peculiarities in them fancifully recalling those of

some animal, and the tendency to apotheosize distinguished ancestors,

thus named after the tiger or the bear, may have led to a confusion of

thought between the animal and the man, till the divine attributes, once

attached to the individual, became transferred to the species of animal

that survived him in constant existence. Or the same fancy, which sees

inspiration in an idiot from his very lack of common reason, may have

attributed peculiar wisdom and looked with peculiar awe on the animal

world, by very reason of its speechlessness. Then, again, the idea that

the bodies of animals may be the depositories of departed human souls may

have led to the worship of certain animals: some Californians for this

reason refraining from the flesh of large game, because it is animated

by the souls of past generations, so that the term ‘eater of venison’

is one of reproach among them. Or the prohibitions of shamans may have

produced the result in some cases: the Thlinkeet Indians being found,

for this reason, abstinent from whale’s flesh or blubber, whilst both

are commonly eaten by surrounding tribes. But, whatever the original

causes may have been, tribes are found all over the world beset with a

feeling of sinfulness with regard to the injuring, eating, or in any way

offending different species of animals; of which, as no extreme instance,

may be mentioned the Fijian custom of presenting a string of new nuts,

gathered expressly, to a land crab, ‘to prevent the deity leaving with

an impression that he was neglected, and visiting his remiss worshippers

with drought, dearth, or death.’

Beyond, however, customs or ideas in prevention of acts prejudicial to

their real or supposed welfare, savage communities appear to have little

idea of any quality in actions rendering them good or bad independently

of consequences. Their prayers, their beliefs, and their mythology,

alike go to prove this. That they will pray for such temporal blessings

as health, food, rain, or victory, but not for such moral gains as the

conquest of passion or a truthful disposition, to some extent justifies

the inference that moral advancement forms no part of their code of

things desirable. Their good and evil spirit or spirits are simply

distinguished, where they are distinguished at all, as the causes

respectively of things agreeable or disagreeable, as taking sides for or

against struggling humanity, so that tribes which pay and sacrifice to

the source of evil, to the neglect of that of good, cannot be said not to

conform to reason. Their mythology, again, owes its very monotony mainly

to the lack of moral interest to relieve and sustain it. As Mr. Grote,

arguing from the mythology to the moral feeling of legendary Greece,

observes, that such a sentiment as a feeling of moral obligation between

man and man was ‘neither operative in the real world nor present to the

imaginations of the poets,’ so it may be said not less emphatically of

extant savage mythology. The Polynesian idea of a god, it has been well

said, is mere _power_ without any reference to goodness. The divine

denizens of Avaiki (the Hades of the Hervey Islands), as they marry,

quarrel, build, and live just like mortals, so they murder, drink,

thieve, and lie quite in accordance with terrestrial precedents.[173] The

unethical nature, however, of savage prayer or mythology is obviously

not incompatible with the practical recognition of certain moral

distinctions; in the same Hervey Islands, for instance, the greatest

possible sin was to kill a fellow-countryman by stealth, instead of in

battle.[174]

Ideas, again, relating to a future state and the dependence of future

welfare on the mode of life spent on earth, though they would seem to

afford some insight into the moral sentiments of those holding them, in

default of definition of the good or bad conduct so rewarded or punished,

do not really prove much. In the following instances, which offer several

shades of variety, there is scarcely any attempt at moral definition, and

the native belief has, perhaps, been adulterated by Christian influence.

The Good Spirit of the Mandans dwelt in a purgatory of cold and frost,

where he punished those who had offended him, before he would admit them

to that warmer and happier place, where the Bad Spirit dwelt and sought

to seduce the happy occupants.[175] For the Charocs of California were

two roads, one strewn with flowers, and leading the good to the bright

Western land, the other bristling with thorns and briers, and leading

the wicked to a place full of serpents. The souls of Chippewyans drifted

in a stone canoe to an enchanted island in a large lake; if the good

actions of their life predominated they were wafted safely ashore; but

if the bad, the canoe sank beneath their weight, leaving the wretches to

float for ever, in sight of their lost and nearly won felicity. Wicked

Okanagans, again, a Columbian tribe (and by the wicked are here specified

murderers and thieves), went to a place where an evil spirit, in human

form, with equine ears and tail, belaboured them with a stick.[176] The

Fijian belief appears truer to savage thought; for whilst such of their

dead as succeeded in reaching Mbula were happy or not, according as

they had lived so as to please the gods, mortals subjected to special

punishment were persons who had not their ears bored, women who were not

tattooed, and men who had not slain an enemy.[177]

Taking, however, these instances at their best, there is nothing to show

that the good or bad, rewarded or punished as above described, were

really anything more than those who on earth had fought and hunted with

courage or cowardice. Writers citing such beliefs do not always make

allowance for the difference between the savage and the civilised moral

standard. The code to be observed, says Schoolcraft, in order for the

soul to pass safely the stream which leads to the land of bliss, ‘appears

to be, as drawn from their funeral addresses, fidelity and success as a

hunter in providing for his family, and bravery as a warrior in defending

the rights and honour of his tribe. There is no moral code regulating the

duties and reciprocal intercourse between man and man.’[178] And if the

good American Indians above mentioned were distinguished by any higher

moral attributes than those of mere bravery and activity, it is difficult

to account for the fact that, while Mexican civilisation consigned all

who died natural deaths, good and bad alike, to the dull repose of

Mictlan, reserving for the higher pleasures of futurity those who met

their deaths in war or water, or from lightning, disease, or childbirth,

tribes whose culture stood to that of Mexico as far removed as that of

Polynesia from that of Europe, should have attained to the moral belief

of the influence of earthly conduct reaching beyond the grave.[179]

The foregoing brief review of some of the real evidence on the subject

would seem to indicate the conclusion that, in matters of morals, savages

are neither so low as they have been painted by most writers nor so

blameless as they have been portrayed by some. Their faults, such as

their vindictiveness, their ingratitude, or their mendacity, might be

predicated as easily of communities the most advanced in the world;

nor, in the face of the great neglect of precision of language in all

narratives of travel, can any evidence of the utter ignorance of right

and wrong among any tribe lay claim to the smallest scientific value. Of

the African Yorubas, whilst one writer asserts that they are not only

covetous and cruel, but ‘wholly deficient in what the civilised man calls

conscience,’ of the same people another says that they have several

words in their language to express honour, and ‘more proverbs against

ingratitude than perhaps any other people.’[180]

Perhaps no description of savage character is fairer than Mariner’s

of the Tongan Islanders. ‘Their notions,’ he says, ‘in respect to

honour and justice are tolerably well-defined, steady, and universal;

but in point of practice both the chiefs and the people, taking them

generally, are irregular and fickle, being in some respects extremely

honourable and just, and in others the contrary, as a variety of

causes may operate.’[181] But the justice of such remarks is lost in

their vagueness, and their impartial generality would render them of

world-wide rather than of merely local or insular application.

If, therefore, in consideration of the unsatisfactory nature of the

direct evidence, we resort to the indirect for the materials of our

judgment, we shall perhaps not err widely from the truth if we say that

average savage morality coincides very much with that of any contemporary

remote village of the civilised world, where the fear of retaliation and

disgrace is the chief preventive of great wickedness, and the natural

play of the social affections the main safeguard of good order. The

statement calls for but few limitations, that wherever travellers have

explored, or missionaries taught, they have been able to detect customary

laws regulating the relations of civil life, the orderly transference of

property by exchange or inheritance, no less than the fixed succession

to titles and dignities. They have found not only punishments for the

prevention, but judicial ordeals for the detection, of crimes; nor is

it possible to believe that such penal laws can exist without ideas of

wrongness attaching to the deeds they prohibit. But, besides the secular

absolution involved in legal penalties, they have found not unfrequently

a kind of spiritual purification by means of confession, penances, and

fasting; the practice of such confession alone proving that feelings of

remorse are not foreign to savage races, difficult as it must always be

to discriminate between actual remorse for wickedness and the mere dread

of contingent punishment. The greater social crimes, murder, theft, and

adultery, though not recognized as morally worse than many acts of purely

fanciful badness, are sufficiently prevented by the fear of revenge or

of tribal punishment; and statements concerning indifference to the

immorality of such actions either do not rest on good evidence or apply

to extra-tribal, that is, to hostile relations. It seems, therefore, that

fundamentally the two extremities of civilisation are ethically united;

each having for its standard of morality the idea of its own welfare,

and deriving a sense of moral obligation from a more or less vague dread

of consequences. The fundamental identity of human emotions, of the

operations of the feelings of love, fear, hope, and shame, appear to have

produced, in different stages of culture, very similar moral feelings;

nor is it conceivable that such feelings, howsoever much weaker, were

ever radically different in the most remote antiquity.

V.

_SAVAGE POLITICAL LIFE._

From the accounts of travellers respecting the nature of government among

uncivilised tribes it would not be a purely baseless theory to construct

a scale of successive developments, ranging from people entirely

destitute of political cohesion to people characterised by a quite

despotic form of government, and agreeing in the main with the fishing or

hunting and the agricultural stages of human advancement respectively.

The savage idea of monarchy is represented by all the possible gradations

between the most limited and the most absolute kind of government, and

we should naturally look for the best types of the latter among tribes

where geographical limitations or other causes have necessitated a

stationary and agricultural life. We should expect to find the first

germs of recognised leadership among people taught by war and the chase

to appreciate superior strength or skill; and to see such temporary

leaders pass into definite political chiefs, when a more settled mode

of life has given fixedness to ideas of property and made its defence

more desirable. We might infer _à priori_ that as men lived by hunting

or fishing before they drove flocks, and drove flocks before they tilled

the ground, so they lived in families before they lived in hordes, and in

hordes before they lived in larger social aggregates. As representatives

of the lowest stage of society, we might instance the Esquimaux, whom

Cranz found ‘destitute of the very shadow of a civil polity;’ and we

might pass from the hunting populations of America, who only choose

rulers for the temporary purposes of war or the chase, to the despotic

forms of government characteristic of the agricultural communities of

Africa or Polynesia.

It is not, however, worth insisting on an induction which would be at the

mercy of negative instances drawn from so large a surface as the whole

known globe. To supply only one instance, in which the hunting state

co-exists with a somewhat advanced political system. Most South American

tribes, who practised husbandry in addition to fishing and hunting to

a far greater extent than North American tribes, were found, in point

of social organisation, at a much lower level than the Northern tribes,

it being possible to classify the latter into nations by words supplied

by themselves, whilst in the South there were merely bands, and it was

necessary to invent names for such groups of bands as were allied

together by language.[182] Facts are the test of theories, not theories

of facts; and to insist on fitting facts to a theory is to fall into the

error of the unskilful shoemaker, who transposes the task of fitting

shoes to feet for the easier one of insisting that feet shall fit his

shoes.

Without, therefore, attempting to elaborate theories about the

development of political ideas from their rudest beginnings to their

expression in mature and complex state-systems, it may not be labour lost

to collect, within readable compass, some estimate of the notions of

sovereignty, the political organisations, the relations of classes, and

the peculiar institutions found among those communities of the earth who

seem the best representatives of primitive manners and the least advanced

from a state of primitive barbarism.

Statements concerning the total absence of civil government among

savages, like statements concerning their total ignorance of religion,

should be received with the reserve due to all propositions containing

terms of expansive signification. It is noteworthy that it is generally

tribes declared to be destitute of all religious feelings who in the

same sentence or paragraph are described as also destitute of political

ties; the statement that a tribe is entirely destitute of religion

or of any civil polity being, in fact, often only an hyperbolical

expression, intended to convey an extreme idea of their barbarity.

Bushmen, Californians, and Australians have severally been described as

not only not recognizing any gods, but as not recognizing any chiefs;

but subsequent research having proved that Bushmen, at least, possess an

elaborate mythology, worshipping the ethereal bodies, and having their

own distinctive myths concerning the Creation, suspicion is naturally

aroused that all broadly negative assertions of the same sort may be but

the results of insufficient observation.[183] ‘The Caribs,’ says one

writer, ‘had no chiefs; every man obeyed the dictates of his passions

unrestrained by government or laws;’ but according to another they lived

in hordes of from forty to fifty persons, under a patriarchal form of

government, and recognized a common chief whenever they went to war with

their neighbours.[184]

Undoubtedly, however, in countries where excess of numbers has not driven

communities to improve their condition by raids against their neighbours,

and where, consequently, military skill has attained no importance nor

authority, much looser social bonds may be found than in places where

a sense of property and of its value has arisen. Among people like

the Esquimaux, the Lapps, or the Kamschadals, who live together in

independent families, age is the only title to authority; and if skill in

seal-catching or in weather-lore procure for a Greenlander the deference

of younger members of his race, he has no power to compel any of them

to follow his counsels, and the only moral check to a refractory person

is a possible refusal on the part of his fellows to share the same hut

with him. If, in distant voyages, all the boatmen submit their kajaks to

the guidance of their countryman who is best acquainted with the way,

they are at perfect liberty to separate from him at pleasure. Beyond

this slight tie they have, or had when Cranz wrote, no political union,

no system of taxation or legislation of any kind, albeit they were not

wanting in methods for the enforcement of certain moral duties and the

prevention of certain moral wrongs. Of the Kamschadals, Steller tells us

that they had no chief, but that everyone was allowed to live according

to his pleasure; yet that they chose leaders for their expeditions,

who were without even power to decide private disputes, and that each

_ostrog_, or family settlement, had its ruler (generally the oldest

male), whose power to punish consisted solely in the right of verbal

correction.[185]

From the condition of the Kamschadals or Esquimaux to the condition of

Eastern Asia or Polynesia, where a king’s name is often so sacred as

to be avoided altogether, as many gradations of civil authority exist

as otherwise mark the difference of their respective civilisations. As

the progress of an individual from infancy to old age is marked at each

stage by a strict equipoise of good and evil, varying only in kind, so

every upward step in the social advancement of mankind seems attended

with some equivalent loss. Individual liberty is greatest where the

social bond is the loosest; and people like the rude hunting tribes of

Brazil, with only their hunting-grounds to defend and only temporary

leaders to obey, undoubtedly enjoy greater freedom than is compatible

with an agricultural life. As soon as tribes become settled and practise

husbandry they are naturally impelled to seek the labour of slaves,

which is a thing undesirable when a scanty subsistence is gained by

the exertions of the chase. And when once the existence of slavery has

established a difference between bondsmen and free, a way is open for all

those artificial divisions of society into ranks and castes which seem in

later times to belong to, nay, to constitute, the natural order of things.

It is, however, even at lower levels of general culture, often among

tribes who are still in the hunting stage, that we find all traces

disappear of that condition of freedom and equality once fondly imagined

to belong to a ‘state of nature.’ Savages seldom constitute pure

democracies, in the sense either of all being equal or of all being

free. Even where the monarchical power is quite rudimentary well-marked

distinctions serve to sever them into aristocracy and commonalty; for

the natural differences of capacity between men divide them, if less

strongly, not less definitely than slavery. Superiority in courage,

strength, sagacity, or experience, entitles a savage to much the

same privileges that, in more civilised countries, are allotted to

superiority in wealth or lineage. The conditions, however, of savage life

cause merit, and not birth, to be the primary qualification both for

chieftainship and nobility. Where military capacity is the sole basis of

authority it follows that such authority only descends to sons, if they

are as gifted as their parents with military prowess; also, that any

commoner may at any time become a noble if duly qualified for a leader,

and that for the same reason even the female sex is not excluded from a

career of political ambition. Among the Abipones women were often raised

to the dignity of cacique or captainship of a horde; nor is it rare to

find them capable of occupying positions of similar dignity among tribes

who, in other respects, treat their women as little better than beasts

of burthen. The Iroquois women, for instance, on whom devolved all

daily labour, such as planting the corn, cutting and carrying firewood,

bearing all burdens when marching, had their representatives in the

public councils, enjoyed a veto upon declarations of war, and the right

of interposing to bring about a peace.[186] Khond wives filled the

same important post of mediators and peace-makers in the wars between

the tribes of their husbands and their parents; and in Africa, where

the position of women is almost uniformly one of slavery, they are

ambassadors, traders, warriors, sometimes queens, besides tilling the

ground, tending the herds, or working in mines.[187]

As many savages surround the entrance to their paradise with imaginary

physical difficulties which only the bravest can overcome, so they

frequently make admission to the rank of their nobility dependent on the

performance of certain rites and ceremonies which sufficiently attest

the endurance of the aspirant to social elevation. An Indian tribe on

the Orinoco used to lay such a candidate on a hurdle, place burning

coals beneath, and then cover him with palm-leaves all over, in order

to make the heat more suffocating. Or, they would perhaps anoint him

with honey, and leave him for hours tied to a tree at the mercy of the

insects of those latitudes. The Abiponian plan was, to place a black

bead on a tribeman’s tongue and insist on his staying at home for three

days, abstaining all the while from the ordinary pleasures of food,

drink, and speech. Then on the eve of the day of his inauguration all

the women of the horde would come to his tent, in uncouth attire, and

lament loudly for the ancestors of the man who would fain be a noble.

The next day, after galloping spear in hand on horses decorated with

bells and feathers to the four quarters of the wind, he had to suffer the

priestess of the ceremonies to shave a band on his head, three inches

wide from the forehead backwards. A eulogy by the old woman, recording

his warlike character and noble actions, concluding with a change of name

befitting his change of rank, completed the ceremony of his installation.

In ancient Mexico a candidate for the noble order of the Tecuhtli had

to remain impassive whilst the high priest insulted him, whilst the

assistant priests mocked him as a coward and tore his clothes from his

body, and all this previous to a noviciate which lasted two years, and

ended with four days of severe penance, fastings, and prayers.[188]

The prevalence, indeed, of equality among savages is one of those

fictions which date from the time when writers drew on their own minds

for a knowledge of anthropology: a fiction due to the same tendency which

created for the Greeks their Elysian Fields, or for the Tongan islanders

their Bolotu, leading them to refer to the distant or the unknown

the actualisation of those longings and ideals which the immediate

surroundings of the world could not gratify. But the truth is, that so

firmly among most savages has the idea become fixed of an essential

difference in the nature of nobles and commons, of governors and

governed, that the demarcations of their mundane economy are transferred

into their speculations about the unseen world, and the inequalities of

this life are often perpetuated in the next. New Zealanders believed

that, whilst all spirits at death went as falling stars to Reinga, or

the lower world, those of chiefs went first of all to heaven, where

their left eye remained as a star.[189] Among the Zulus the snakes into

which departed chiefs turn are easily distinguishable from those which

embody commoner people.[190] As paupers and bondsmen were not admitted

to Valhalla, so the ‘masses’ of the Tongan islanders have neither souls

nor futurity. The Dahomans who call this world their plantation and the

next their home, believe that in the latter ‘the king is a king and the

slave a slave for ever and ever.’[191] In Samoa not only had chiefs a

larger hole than plebeians by which to descend to the under world, but

also a separate habitation, serving as columns to support the temple

of the underground god, and enjoying the best of food and all other

pleasures.[192] Whilst the Thlinkeets burnt most bodies, that they might

be warm in their new home, slaves were buried, as only deserving to

freeze there; and the Ahts, allotting a plenteous and sunny land in the

sky to dead chiefs, relegate persons of low degree to a subterranean

abode, where the houses are poor, the deer small, and the blankets

thin.[193]

Devices have varied all over the world for marking the innate or acquired

differences between men. The Tibboos of Africa denote difference of

rank by different scars on the face; but distinctions in dress or in

titles have been the usual resort of the civilised and semi-civilised

world alike; and the highest Fijian chiefs, who would style themselves

the ‘subjects of Heaven only,’ were prompted by the same natural vanity

that gave birth among ourselves to the ‘Knights of the Lion and Sun’

or to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. But the most striking

device in the lower grades of civilisation is the conscious invention

and use of a different form of speech, amounting almost to the use of

a different language, such as was the plan adopted by the Abipones to

mark the difference between noble and plebeian. Persons advanced to the

rank of nobles, or the Hocheri, were not only distinguished from their

fellows by a change of name (men adding the suffix _in_, women _en_, to

their former appellation), but the whole language spoken by the Hocheri

was, by the insertion or addition of syllables, so altered from the

vulgar tongue as to amount to a distinct aristocratic dialect.[194] It is

remarkable how a similar practice prevails in widely remote parts of the

globe. Among Circassians the language for the common people is one, that

for the princes and nobility another; nor may the commonalty, though they

understand it, venture to speak in the secret or court language.[195] ‘As

in the Malayan so in the Fijian language, there exists an aristocratical

dialect,’ and in some places ‘not a member of a chiefs body or the

commonest acts of his life are mentioned in ordinary phraseology,

but are all hyperbolised.’[196] In the Sandwich Islands ‘the chiefs

formed a conventional dialect, or court language, understood only among

themselves. If any of its terms became known by the lower orders they

were immediately discarded and others substituted.’[197] So, too, it is

said that the island Caribs held their war councils in a secret dialect,

known only to the chiefs and elders, into which they were initiated after

attaining distinction in war.[198] Of the Society Islanders, Ellis tells

us that ‘sounds in the language composing the names of the king and queen

could no longer be applied to ordinary significations’—a rule, he adds,

which brought about many changes in the words used for things.[199]

Lastly, in the Tongan islands something of the same kind also prevailed,

for there we find that among the ways of paying special honour to the

Tooitonga, or divine chief, was the employment, in speaking with him,

of words devoted exclusively to his use, as substitutes for words of

ordinary parlance.

Another method by which savages seek to mark the different grades of

society is to signalise by an excess of demonstration their sorrow for

the departure of persons of rank from among them. The custom of cutting

off finger-joints in token of grief, from its prevalence among the

Blackfeet Indians of North America, the Hottentots of South Africa,

some tribes of Australia, and among the female portion of the Charruas

of South America, may be considered to rank among the remarkable

analogies of world-culture, when we find that a similar custom prevailed

also among the Tongan Islanders whenever the death of a chief or a

superior relation left his survivors comfortless. It is possible that

the idea of propitiating angry gods by self-inflicted pains may have

originally underlain many of the practices in after times regarded as

mere manifestations of grief; for Captain Cook, speaking of the knocking

out of front teeth at funerals, says that he always understood that

this custom, like that of cutting off finger-joints, was not inflicted

from any violence of grief so much as intended for a propitiatory

sacrifice to the Atoa, to avert any possible danger or mischief from the

survivors.[200] Thus Bushmen sacrifice the end joints of their fingers in

sickness; and during the illness of a Tooitonga his countrymen would seek

to appease the god whose anger had caused the disease by the sacrifice

daily of the little finger of a young relation. Mariner mentions two

patriotic young Tonganers contesting with fist and foot the right thus

to testify their regard for the lord of their country. It is easily

conceivable how a practice, begun with the idea of conciliating the cause

of a disease, might be continued for the purpose of conciliating the

cause of death, and thus how (as in Fiji, where on the death of a king

orders were issued that one hundred fingers should be cut off) an archaic

superstition might pass into a meaningless formality.

There are, however, various other ways of exhibiting regret for departed

nobility. In the Sandwich Islands, if a chief dies, the highest mark

of respect his survivors can show is to strike out one of their front

teeth with a stone. They also tattoo their tongues, deprive themselves

of an ear, or shave their heads in fantastic designs. The latter is

a world-wide symbol of sorrow; more peculiar is the license to rob

and burn houses and commit other enormities, which is, or was once,

customary in Hawaii on the death of a chief. In Tonga and Tahiti it was

customary on such occasions to cut the forehead and breast with sharks’

teeth. Axes, clubs, knives, stones, or shells were employed freely for

self-mutilation, when Finow, the King of Tonga, died; his disconsolate

subjects seeking to induce him, by the energy of their blows and the

loudness of their prayers, to lay aside those suspicions of their loyalty

which had prompted him to depart from Tonga to Bolotu.[201]

In modern civilised life such clear distinctions exist no longer, but

there is at least one symbol of nobility which bears distinct traces of

descent from uncivilised conceptions and usages. From the common practice

of making a particular species of animal the totem, or representative,

of a particular person, family, or tribe, arose probably the custom of

distinguishing persons or families by crests, figurative of their patron

animals. Both among the Kolushs, a fishing North American tribe, and

their neighbours, the Haidahs, of Queen Charlotte’s Island, the existence

of an aristocracy of birth is proved from the presence of family crests

among them, derived from figures of certain animals. Sir G. Grey noticed

in Australia that each family adopted some animal or vegetable for its

crest or Kobong,[202] and the hereditary nobility of the rude Thlinkeet

Indians paint or carve the heraldic emblem of their clan on their houses,

boats, robes, shields, or wherever else they can find room for it.[203]

These few instances from the lower culture suffice to explain how animal

figures, supposed to be expressive of the character of gods or warriors,

came to be worn above their helmets; and how in the case of warriors at

least, they gradually passed from their helmets to their shields, till

they became part of armorial bearings, so highly prized and zealously

transmitted from generation to generation. Newton, the author of the

‘Display of Heraldry,’ expresses his belief that the most ancient class

of crests were taken from ferocious animals, which were regarded as

figuratively representing the bearer and his pursuits. Certain it is that

a far larger proportion of crests are derived from the animal world, from

beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, and even insects, than from any other

sublunary class of things.[204]

If now we turn to the savage conception of monarchy, we shall find that,

wherever regal authority exists, it is sustained by a more or less strong

belief in the divine origin of kings. The constitutional power of a king

varies with the amount of divinity ascribed to him. As Russians of the

sixteenth century held the will of their Grand Duke to be the will of

God, and whatever he did to be done by the will of God,[205] so now in

Africa the king of Loango is not only honoured as a god, but known by

the same name as the Deity; namely, Samba. His subjects, accrediting him

with power over the elements, pray to him for rain in times of drought.

But as a king’s divine origin means his divine right, or in other words

his despotic power, his subjects only enjoy their lives and property

on the tenure of his will, nor does there seem any moral limitation to

his regal rights, save an obligation to make use of native products and

dresses. The king of Dahomey, also revered as a god, appears to possess

power over his countrymen which is only so far limited, that he cannot

behead princes of the blood royal but must confine his vengeance against

them to strangulation or slavery. Without his leave no caboceer may alter

his house, wear European shoes, or carry an umbrella. Many kings of the

Fiji Islands claimed a divine origin and asserted the rights of deities,

their persons indeed being so religiously revered that even in battle

their inferiors would fear to strike them. In Tahiti, Oro, the chief

god, was called the king’s father, and the same homage that was paid to

the gods and their temples was paid also to the king and his dwellings,

the homage, namely, of stripping to the waist. At his coronation the

king asserted his dominion over the sea, by being rowed in Oro’s sacred

canoe and receiving congratulation from two divine sharks. So that it

was no mere spirit of bombastic adulation that caused the king’s houses

to be identified, in popular parlance, with the Clouds of Heaven, the

lights in them with the Lightning, or his canoe with the Rainbow; and

if his voice was described as the Thunder, it doubtless was due to that

common association of electricity with divinity, such as, for instance,

prompted the savages of Chili to employ the same name for Thunder and for

God. The ceremony of creating a Tahitian king consisted in girding him

with a girdle of red feathers, which, as they were taken from the chief

idols, were thought to be capable of conferring on the monarch the divine

attributes of power and vengeance. That a human sacrifice was essential,

not only at the commencement and completion of the girdle, but often for

every piece successively added to it, confirms the experience of all

ages and countries respecting the tendency of monarchical governments

in barbarous times, a tendency which was never better appreciated than

by the ancient Japanese. For they used to make their prince sit crowned

on his throne for some hours every morning, without suffering him to

move his hands or feet, his head or eyes, or indeed any part of his

body, believing that by this means alone could peace and tranquillity be

preserved; and ‘if unfortunately he turned himself on one side or the

other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it

was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune

was near at hand to desolate the country.’[206] The Samoans thought also

that some deadly influence radiated from the person of a king which could

only be broken by aspersion with water.[207]

Inasmuch, however, as government of any kind is impossible without a

subdivision of functions, and a king needs ministers to execute his will,

the limitation of a council is almost inseparable from even the most

absolute monarchy. A perfectly pure despotism exists, therefore, nowhere

save in the definitions of the science of politics. It is, indeed,

difficult to conceive an arbitrary government except as a synonym for

total anarchy. In Loango, where the king nominates and displaces his

officers at pleasure, and is absolute disposer of his subjects’ lives and

liberties, armed resistance is said to be often made against him, and his

power to depend on his wealth and connections. Even a king of Dahomey

said that he would imperil his life if he attempted to put down slavery

and human sacrifices all at once, and it is said that whatever despotic

acts may be witnessed in Africa they are all performed according to the

common law of the land.[208] Among the Ashantees there are four men at

the head of the nobility who exert great influence and serve to balance

the monarchical power.[209] Among the Kaffirs, the chiefs of hordes,

though with power of life and death, are restrained by the councillors

they themselves nominate from attacking ancient usages; and though the

king is despotic, his despotism must not transgress known laws. The right

of desertion also which practically belongs to every member of a horde,

acts as a most effectual moral check upon tyrannical tendencies. Indeed,

throughout Africa, the differentiation of functions of government, or the

division of political labour, is carried to an extent which proves how

little necessary connection there is between high political capacity and

high culture in other respects. In Dahomey, where a man’s life is less

sacred than that of a fox in England, there are two chief ministers in

constant attendance on the king, a third who is commander-in-chief of the

army, and a fourth who superintends the due punishment of crimes.

The existence, again, of grades of society, clearly marked by differences

of functions and privileges, is itself a proof of a political

organisation which implies limitations to the exercise of sovereignty.

Classes with distinct rights and relations prove the constraint of a

public law which even monarchs must recognise and respect. In Fetu in

Africa, where frequently from four to five hundred slaves are killed

at a king’s funeral to serve him beyond the grave, there is a distinct

class of freemen, with specific rights, sprung from the noble and slave

classes. So, also, wherever the Malay race has settled in the Pacific,

their feudal institutions and classes bear a striking resemblance to

those of mediæval Europe. In the Fiji Islands, such classes are said to

be so clearly defined as to amount almost to a system of caste. They are:—

1. The kings and queens.

2. Chiefs of large dependent islands or districts.

3. Chiefs of towns, and priests.

4. Warriors of low birth; chiefs of carpenters and of

turtle-fishers.

5. The people.

6. The slaves taken in war.

With which may be compared the Tongan social scale:—

1. The Tooitonga and Veachi, chiefs of divine descent.

2. The king, or How.

3. The Egi, or nobles; all persons in any way related to the

two former classes.

4. The priests.

5. The Matabooles, attendants on chiefs, managers of

ceremonies, preservers of records, &c.

6. The Mooas, or younger sons or brothers of the Matabooles.

7. The Tooas, or common people, who practise such arts as are

not dignified enough to pass from father to son, as cookery,

club carving, shaving, or tattooing.

These ranks are so fixed and unalterable that they form a prominent

feature in the Tongan conception of a future world. Rank, not merit,

constitutes the title of admission to Bolotu. All _noble_ souls arrive

there and enjoy a power similar but inferior to that of the original

deities, being capable, like the latter, of inspiring priests living on

earth. The Matabooles also gain admittance to Bolotu, but are unable to

cause priestly inspirations. The souls of the Tooas dissolve with the

body, as too plebeian to find a place in Paradise.

In the Sandwich Islands, there were formerly three aristocratic

orders—the first consisting of the king and queen, their relations, and

the chief councillors; the second of the chiefs of dependent districts;

the third of the chiefs of villages and of priests. Servile homage from

all the inferior classes was paid to these three orders, but particularly

to the priests and higher chiefs, their very persons and houses being

accounted sacred, and the sight of them a peremptory signal for

prostration. The people, as in mediæval Europe, were attached to the soil

and transferred with it: but a strong customary law is said nevertheless

to have regulated both the tenure of land and personal security.[210] If

they had no voice in the government, they sometimes took part in public

meetings, nor did the king ever resolve on matters of weight without the

counsel of his principal chiefs. Yet government was more despotic in

the Sandwich than in either the Society or the Fiji Islands. In Tahiti,

public assemblies were held, in which the speakers did not hesitate to

compare the state to a ship, of which the king was only the mast, but the

landed nobility the ropes that kept it upright.[211]

Many savage tribes have succeeded, by speciously devised forms and

ceremonies, in clothing arbitrary power with a cloak of legality,

inviolably divine. The most remarkable of these devices is the famous

institution of _tabu_, which, by transferring the divinity inherent

in a king or chief to everything that comes in contact with him, early

invested sovereign power with a most facile and elastic weapon of

government. For the principle, that whatever a king touched became sacred

to his use, supplied regal power with a most convenient immunity from

the shackles of ordinary morality. A Fijian king, by giving his dress to

an English sailor, enabled the latter to appropriate whatever food he

chose to envelope with the train of his dress. Whatever house a Tahitian

king or queen enters is vacated by its owners; the field they tread on

becomes theirs; their clothes, their canoes, the very men who carry them,

are invested with a sanctity the violation of which is death, and are

regarded as precisely as holy as objects less, ostensibly associated with

earthly necessities.

But whether or not the institution of _tabu_ was a clever invention of

kings for increasing their power, its inevitable extension reacted in

time as a limitation to it. This may be illustrated from the Tongan

Islands, where the regal power, owing probably to a long constitutional

struggle between the rival claims to sovereignty of birth and merit,

stood in a most anomalous position. For the king did not belong to

the highest rank of the people, his title depending in part on birth,

but principally on his reputation for personal strength and military

capacity. Tooitonga and Veachi, the direct descendants of the gods who

first visited the island, or (as we may perhaps rationalistically

translate it) the direct descendants of the earliest kings, occupied

a higher status than the actual king, and were honoured with

acknowledgments of their divinity which even the king himself had to pay.

To the posterity of bygone monarchs the actual king stood in the relation

of a peasant to a prince, being expected, like anyone else, to sit down

on the ground when they passed, though they might be his inferiors in

wealth nor possessed of any direct power save over their own families and

attendants. The dignity of the Tooitonga survived not only in his not

being circumcised nor tattooed as other men, and in peculiar ceremonies

attending his marriage or his burial, but in the more substantial

offerings of the firstfruits of the year at stated periodical festivals.

The king used to consult him before undertaking a war or expedition,

though often regardless of the counsel offered; and in reference to the

person of either descendant of the gods the king was subject to tabu, or

even in reference to ordinary chiefs in any way related to them. If he

but touched the body, the dress, or the sleeping mat of a chief nearer

related to Tooitonga and Veachi than himself, he could only exempt

himself from the inconveniences incurred by the violation of tabu by the

dispensation attached to the ceremony of touching, with both his hands,

the feet of such supernatural chief, or of some one his equal in rank.

In the Society Islands, in consequence of the regal attribute inseparable

from royalty of tabooing whatever ground it traversed, Tahitian kings

became in course of time either entirely restricted to walking in their

own domains, or subjected to the discomfort of a progress on servile

shoulders over whatever district they wished to visit. So that tabu in

both these instances acted as a limitation to the despotism of the king.

In Tahiti, however, the king’s power was further limited by a custom

which, extending as it did to all the noble classes, was perhaps the most

anomalous institution in the world, whether as regards the theory or the

practice of inherited rank. For the custom compelling a king or a noble

to transfer all his titles and dignity to his firstborn son at the moment

of his birth, whether instituted originally for securing an undisputed

succession to the regency or due to a similar rude confusion of ideas,

such as associates the sanctity of a man’s origin with the sanctity of

all he touches, carried the claims of primogeniture to a degree unknown

either by the Jewish or the English law. ‘Whatever might be the age of

the king, his influence in the state, or the political aspect of affairs

in respect to other tribes, as soon as a son (of noble birth) was born,

the monarch became a subject; the infant son was at once proclaimed

sovereign of the people; the royal name was conferred upon him, and his

father was the first to do him homage by saluting his feet and declaring

him king.’ The national herald, sent round the island with the infant

ruler’s flag, proclaimed his name in every district, and, if it were

acknowledged by the aristocracy, edicts were thenceforth issued in his

name. Not only the homage of his people, but the lands and other sources

of his father’s power, were transferred to the minor child, the father

only continuing to act as regent till his child’s capacity for government

was matured.

The Fijians also have a peculiar custom, the institution of Vasu, which

serves as a barrier both to regal and aristocratic oppression, and shows

how, even among savages, the caprice of individuals is held in bondage

by the traditions of the elders. Vasu signifies the common-law right of

a nephew to appropriate to his own use anything he chooses belonging to

an uncle or to anyone under his uncle’s power. The king often availed

himself of Vasu for his own benefit, it being customary for a nephew to

surrender as tribute most of the legal extortions which his title of Vasu

might enable him to levy. But the king himself was liable to Vasu; for we

are told that, ‘however high a chief may rank, _however powerful a king

may be_, if he has a nephew he has a master;’ for, except his lands and

his wives, neither chief nor king possessed anything which his nephew

might not appropriate at any moment. If, for instance, the uncle built

a canoe for himself, his nephew had only to come, mount the deck, and

sound his trumpet shell, to announce to all the world a legitimate and

indefeasible transfer of ownership. It is even said that on one occasion

a nephew at war with his uncle actually supplied himself, unresisted,

with ammunition from his enemy’s stores. It is difficult indeed to divine

the origin of so singular an institution, unless perhaps we regard it

as surviving from a time when as in so many parts of the world nephews

and not sons ranked as first in inheritance. In Loango the nephews of a

deceased king become princes, whilst his sons descend to the commonalty;

the throne of Ashantee passes not to a man’s natural heir, but to his

brother’s or sister’s son, and the same rule of descent prevails widely

over the world.[212]

In two respects especially, savages may be accredited with having secured

a certain stability for their institutions and saved them from some of

the dangers which have been the bane of more civilised countries. It

entitles them to no slight praise that they have generally so adjusted

the relations of the temporal and spiritual powers as to prevent their

clashing, and have taken its sting from taxation by making the day of

taxpaying a day of public rejoicing. In the Tongan Islands (before the

custom was abolished by a revolutionary king) the tax of the annual

payment of firstfruits to the Tooitonga was almost forgotten in the grand

ceremonies with which it was associated, and tributes received from

inferiors by chiefs came as much as possible in the way of presents,

whilst so far away as the Slave Coast, the feast of taxpaying is the

great recurring Saturnalia of the year. In Dahomey income-tax is ‘paid

under a polite disguise,’ each man bringing a present to the king in

proportion to his rank, and at an annual festival.[213] The feast lasts

a whole month; public plays take place every four or five days; singers

chant the king’s praises and the historical traditions of the country;

and the whole concludes with the ever popular African entertainment

of human sacrifice, on an unlimited scale. In Fiji also taxpaying was

associated with all that the people love; the time of its taking place

being ‘a high day, a day for the best attire, the pleasantest looks, and

the kindest words; a day for display.’ The Fijian carried his tribute

with every demonstration of joyful excitement, paying it in with songs

and dances to a king who received it with smiles and who provided a

feast for the happy taxpayers. So among the Kaffirs the presence of the

four royal[214] taxgatherers in the town was the signal for feasting and

amusements, and when payment had been at last demanded by them they were

conducted out of the town, as they had been welcomed into it, by dancers

and musicians.[215]

In all the lower communities of the globe the priest, as the Shaman who

can invoke rain, who can cause or cure diseases, who can detect the

unknown thief, or read the result of a coming battle, may be revered for

his power as a sorcerer, but he seldom enters into the scheme of the

body politic as an efficient political force. In the Sandwich Islands,

where priestly power was more developed than elsewhere, the priesthood,

though not merely an hereditary body and possessed of much property in

men and lands, but recipients of the same servile homage that was paid

to the highest chiefs, occupied, nevertheless, a subordinate position

to the governing class. As the nation retained a chief priest who had

charge of the national god, so each chief retained his own family priest,

whose function it was to follow him to the battle-field carrying his

war-god and to direct the sacred rites of his house. In New Zealand the

tohunga (or priest) was ‘not significative of a class separated from

the rest by certain distinctions of rank,’ but was an office open to

anyone.[216] In the Tongan Islands, a priest had no respect paid to

him beyond what was due to his family rank, owing to the fact that the

title to the priesthood was dependent on the accident of inspiration by

some god. Whenever a priest invoked the gods (and it was generally on

a person of the lower classes that such inspiration fell), the chiefs,

nay, even the king himself, would sit indiscriminately with the common

people in a circle round him, ‘on account of the sacredness of the

occasion, conceiving that such modest demeanour must be acceptable to

the gods.’[217] Whatever the priest then said was deemed a declaration

of the god, and, in accordance with a confusion of the human voice and

the divine, not unknown elsewhere, the oracle, in speaking, actually

made use of the first person, as though the relation of himself to

the god were not merely one of delegated authority, but of real and

complete identification. Except, however, on such special occasions, a

Tongan priest was distinguished by no particular dress, nor invested

with any official privileges. In Fiji, also, the priests ranked below

the principal chiefs; and the chief priest, though, as in Tahiti, it

was his office to perform the ceremony which introduced the monarch to

regal dignity, seems in nowise to have interfered afterwards with the

sovereignty of his temporal lord. It is remarkable that the power of

priestcraft increases with the increase of civilisation; ultimately

serving to arrest and retard the growth of which it is at once a symptom

and a measure.

If from the foregoing data, collected from the best accredited missionary

sources, it is permissible to speak in general terms of primitive

political life, it would appear that the social organisation of the lower

races stands at a far higher level than too rapid an inspection would

lead a critic to suspect. Their institutions are such as to presuppose

as much ingenuity in their evolution as sagacity in their preservation.

Their despotism is never so unlimited but that it recognises the

existence of a customary code beside and above it; nor is individual

liberty ever so unchecked as to outweigh the advantages or imperil the

existence of a life in common. In short, the subordination of classes,

the belief in the divine right of kings and in differences ordained

by nature between nobles and populace, the principle of hereditary

government (often so firmly fixed that not even women are excluded from

the highest offices), the prevalence of feudalism with its ever-recurring

wars and revolutions, not only prove an identity of social instinct

which is irrespective of latitude or race, but prove also among the

lower races the existence of a capacity for self-government, which is

disturbing to all preconceptions derived from accounts of their manners

and superstitions in other relations of life.

VI.

_SAVAGE PENAL LAWS._

If, interpreting the present by the past, and taking as our standard of

the past contemporary savage life, we endeavour to gain some insight into

the origin of those legal customs and ideas which are so interwoven with

our civilisation, the statements of travellers relating to the judicial

institutions of savage tribes gain considerably in interest and value.

For savage modes of redressing injuries, of assessing punishment, of

discovering truth, reveal not a few striking points of resemblance and

of contrast to the practices prevalent in civilised communities; whilst

they serve at the same time to illustrate the natural laws at work in the

evolution of society.

The different stages of progress from the lowest social state, where the

redress of wrongs is left to individual force or cunning, to the state

where the wrongs of individuals are regarded and punished as wrongs to

the community at large, may be all observed in the customs of modern

or recent savage tribes. Yet instances where the redress of wrongs

is purely a matter of personal retaliation are not really numerous,

occurring chiefly where the rulership of a tribe is ill-defined and is

an exercise of influence rather than authority, as among the Esquimaux,

the Kamschadals, and some Californian and other American tribes. In

such states of society, though some political sovereignty is vested in

the heads of the different families, they have but little power either

to make commands or to inflict punishments, so that self-help is for

individuals the first rule of existence. But generally this deficiency

in the legal protection of life and property is made up for by a

principle which lies at the root of savage law—the principle, that is, of

collective responsibility, of including in the guilt of an individual all

his blood relations jointly or singly.

This consideration of crimes as family or tribal rather than as personal

matters, (the duty of satisfying the family or tribe of anyone injured

devolving upon the family or tribe of the wrongdoer,) must have tended in

the earliest times to withdraw attention from the merely personal aspect

of injuries and to direct it to their more social relations. The common

test of likelihood is no bad guide in ethnology; and the difficulty of

conceiving any society of men, even the most savage, living together

absolutely unaffected by, or uninterested in, wrongs done by one of

their members to another, is only equalled by the difficulty of finding

credible records of any such community. Even in Kamschatka, where the

head of an ostrog had only the power to punish verbally, a man caught

stealing was held so infamous, that no one would befriend him, and he had

to live thenceforth alone without help from anybody; whilst, if the habit

seemed inveterate, the thief was bound to a tree, and his arms bound by

a piece of birch-bark to a pole stretched crosswise; the bark was then

ignited, and the man’s hands, thereby branded, marked his character in

future to all who might be interested in knowing it.[218] Even in so rude

a tribe as the Brazilian Topanazes, a murderer of a fellow-tribesman

would be conducted by his relations to those of the deceased, to be by

them forthwith strangled and buried, in satisfaction of their rights;

the two families eating together for several days after the event as

though for the purpose of reconciliation.[219] And several other tribes,

destitute of any chiefs possessing the power or right to judge or punish,

have fixed customs regulating such offences as theft or murder. Thus

the Nootka Indians avenge or compound for punishable acts, though their

chiefs have little or no voice in the matter. Where, as among the Haidahs

of Columbia, crime likewise has no legal punishment, murder being simply

an affair to be settled with the robbed family, we may detect the

beginnings of later legal practices in the occasional agreement among

the leading men to put to death disagreeable members of the tribe, such

as medicine-men, and other great offenders.[220] So that wherever, from

causes of war or otherwise, tribal chieftaincy has become at all fixed

and powerful, we may expect to find the chief or chiefs called upon to

settle disputes between individuals or families; and thus gradually a way

would be found for the addition of judicial functions to the more primary

duties of government.

From this natural tendency of submitting disputed claims or the measure

of redress to the decision of a single chieftain or of several, the

personal right of retaliation would soon become a tribal one; and though

ignorant of the science of jurisprudence, most savage tribes seem

early to have learnt to treat torts or offences against an individual

as crimes or offences against the community, taking as their standard

of punishment the measure of the wrong done to the individual. The

transfer of sovereignty from smaller units to the tribe is clearly

marked in instances where the chiefs of a tribe try crimes and decide

guilt, but leave the punishment of the offender to the discretion of the

injured persons or family; of which the following are characteristic

illustrations.

According to Catlin, every Indian tribe he visited had a council-house

in the middle of their village, where the chiefs would assemble, as well

for the investigation of crimes as for public business, giving decisions

after trial concerning capital offences, but leaving the punishment to

the nearest of kin, to be inflicted by him under the penalty of social

disgrace, but free from any control by them as to time, place, or

manner.[221] So also on the Gold Coast, where suits lay at the decision

of the caboceros or chiefs, the original conception of murder appears

clearly, in the practice for the murderer to get generally from the

relations of the deceased some abatement of the pecuniary penalty affixed

by law to his crime; they being the only persons the criminal had to

agree with, and free to take from him as little as they pleased, whilst

the king had no pretence to any share of the fine except what he might

get for his trouble in exacting it.[222] In the Central African kingdom

of Bornou, a convicted murderer was handed over to the discretional

revenge of the murdered man’s family.[223] In Samoa, again, the chief of

a village and the heads of families, forming as they did the judicial as

well as legislative body, might condemn a culprit to sit for hours naked

in the sun, to be hung by his head, to take five bites from a pungent

root, or to play at ball with a prickly sea-urchin, according to the

nature of his offence. But one punishment was especially remarkable, as

showing how the right of punishment originally belonging to the family

may survive in form long after it has in reality passed to a wider

political union. This was the punishment of binding a criminal hand and

foot and carrying him suspended from a prickly pole run through between

his hands and feet, to the family of the village against which he had

transgressed, and there depositing him before them, as if to signify that

he lay at their mercy.[224] And in the villages of Afghanistan, where an

assembly of the elders act as the judges of the people, a show is always

made of delivering up the criminal to the accuser and of giving the

latter the chance of retaliating, though it is perfectly understood that

he must comply with the wishes of the assembly. This instance, therefore,

illustrates the two distinct methods of legal punishment in process of

actual transition from one to the other.[225]

If then the original standard of punishment was just that amount of

severity which would suffice to prevent individuals from seeking

satisfaction by their private efforts and avenging their own wrongs,

it is intelligible that penal customs should be cruel in proportion to

their primitiveness. It is distinctly stated that in Samoa fines in food

and property gradually superseded more severe penalties. Yet, in the

face of the very varying penalties found in most different conditions of

culture, it is a subject on which it is difficult to lay down any rule.

Sometimes murder alone is a capital crime, sometimes theft, witchcraft,

and adultery as well; sometimes all or some of them are commutable by

fine. Nor does it seem that, wherever an offence is punishable by fine,

the penalty has been mitigated from one originally more severe. In some

cases the chief judges may have found their interest in assessing a more

humane, and to themselves more profitable, forfeit than that of life or

limb; but savages, living in the most primitive conditions, seem to have

been led by their natural reason alone to observe fitting proportions

between crime and retribution. For their punishments, in default

generally of imprisonment or banishment, are not as a rule gratuitously

cruel: though as occasional punishments among the Caffres are mentioned

the application of hot stones to the naked body, or exposure to the

torments of ants;[226] and slavery, so common a punishment in Africa,

far from being essentially cruel, is rather a sign of an amelioration

of manners, of a reasonable willingness to take the useful satisfaction

of a man’s labour in lieu of the useless one of his life. Severity of

the penal code would rather seem to be a concomitant of growth in

civilisation, of stronger and deeper moral feelings, of a sense of the

failure of milder means, than of a really primitive savagery. On the

whole continent of America no savage tribe ever approached the Aztecs in

cruelty of punishment, nor is it among people of a ruder type of culture

that we should ever look to find some form of death the penalty alike

for the lightest as for the gravest crimes, for slander no less than for

adultery, for intoxication as much as for homicide.[227]

It might naturally be inferred that, because the laws of savages are

unwritten and depend on usage alone for their preservation, therefore

they are entirely uncertain and arbitrary. This, however, is not often

the case. On few points are the statements of travellers less vague than

on the details of native penal customs; a fact which is only compatible

with their being both well known and regularly enforced. What the Abbé

Froyart says of the natives of Loango, may be said of all but the

lowest tribes: ‘There is no one ignorant of the cases which incur the

pain of death, and of those for which the offender becomes the slave

of the person offended.’[228] The laws of the Caffre tribes are said

to be a collection of precedents, of decisions of bygone chiefs and

councils, appealing solely to what has been customary in the past, never

to the abstract merits of the case. There appears, it is said, to be

no uncertainty whatever in their administration, the criminality of

different acts being measured exactly by a fixed number of cattle payable

in atonement. And the customs reported from Ashantee manifest a similar

sense of the value of fixed penalties. An Ashantee is at liberty to kill

his slave, but is punished if he kills his wife or child; only a chief

can sell his wife or put her to death for infidelity; whilst a great

man who kills his equal in rank is generally suffered to die by his own

hands. If a man brings a frivolous accusation against another, he must

give an entertainment to the family and friends of the accused; if he

breaks an Aggry bead in a scuffle, he must pay seven slaves to the owner.

A wife who betrays a secret forfeits her upper lip, an ear if she listens

to a private conversation of her husband.[229] Savage also as is the

kingdom of Dahomey, arbitrary power is so far limited, that no sentence

of death or slavery, adjudged by an assembly of chiefs, can be carried

out without confirmation from the throne; and such a sentence ‘must be

executed in the capital, and notice given of it by the public crier in

the market.’ It is no paradox to say, that human life, even in Dahomey,

enjoys more efficient legal protection at this day than it did in England

in times long subsequent to the signature of Magna Charta.

The forms of legal procedure manifest often no less regularity than the

laws themselves. In Congo the plaintiff opens his case on his knees

to the judge, who sits under a tree or in a great straw hut built on

purpose, holding a staff of authority in his hand. When he has heard the

plaintiff’s evidence he hears the defendant, then calls the witnesses,

and decides accordingly. The successful suitor pays a sum to the judge’s

box, and stretches himself at full length on the ground to testify

his gratitude.[230] In Loango, the king, acting as judge, has several

assessors to consult in difficult cases, and the suit begins by both

parties making a present to the king, who then proceeds to hear in turn

plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses. In default of witnesses the affair

is deferred, spies being sent to gather ampler information and ground for

judgment from the talk of the people. In the public trials of Ashantee

‘the accused is always heard fully, and is obliged either to commit or

exculpate himself on every point.’ On the Gold Coast a plaintiff would

sometimes defer his suit for thirty years, letting it devolve on his

heirs, if the judges, the caboceros, from interested motives, delayed to

grant him a trial and thus obliged him to wait, in hopes of finding less

impartial or else more amenable judges in the future.[231]

Several rules of savage jurisprudence betray curiously different notions

of equity from those of more civilised lands. The Abbé Froyart was

shocked that, on the complaint of the missionaries to the King of Loango

of nocturnal disturbances round their dwellings, the king should have

issued an ordinance making the disturbance of the missionaries’ repose a

capital crime. The reason the natives gave him for thus putting slight

offences on an equality with grave ones was, that, in proportion to

the ease of abstinence from anything forbidden, or of the performance

of anything commanded was the inexcusableness of disobedience and the

deserved severity of punishment. Again, impartiality with regard to rank

or wealth, which is now regarded in England as a self-evident principle

of justice, as a primary instinct of equity, is by no means so regarded

by savages; for not only is murder often atoned for according to the

rank of the murderer, as on the Gold Coast or in old Anglo-Saxon law,

on the basis, apparently, of the value to the individual of his loss in

death, but such difference of rank sometimes enters into the estimate of

the due punishment for robbery. Thus the Guinea Coast negroes thought

it reasonable to punish rich persons guilty of robbery more severely

than the poor, because, they said, the rich were not urged to it by

necessity, and could better spare the money-fines laid on them. Caffre

law distinguishes broadly and clearly between injuries to a man’s person

and injuries to his property, accounting the former as offences against

the chief to whom he belongs, and making such chief sole recipient of all

fines, allowing only personal redress where a man’s property has been

damaged. Thus Caffre law divides itself into lines bearing some analogy

to those of our criminal and civil law: such offences as treason, murder,

assault, and witchcraft entering into the criminal code, and constituting

injuries to the actual sufferer’s chief; whilst adultery, slander, and

other forms of theft, enter as it were into the civil law, as injuries

for which there are direct personal remedies.[232]

The almost universal test among savages of guilt or innocence, where

there is a want or conflict of evidence, is the ordeal. At first sight

it would appear that such a practice presupposes a belief in a personal

supernatural deity—that it is, in fact, as it was in the middle ages,

a judgment of God, an appeal to His decision. If so, a theistic belief

would be of wide extent, for the ordeal is common to very low strata of

culture; but, in consideration of the savage belief in the personality

and consciousness of natural objects or in spirits animating them, it

would seem best to regard the ordeal simply as a direct appeal to the

decision of such objects or spirits themselves, or through such objects

to the decision of dead ancestors, a means for the discovery of truth

that would naturally suggest itself to the shamanic class. For it is

at the peril of his life that a shaman, or priest, asserts a title to

superior power and wisdom; and as his skill is tested in every need or

peril that occurs, he is naturally as often called upon to detect hidden

guilt as to bring rain from the clouds, or drive sickness from the body.

Driven, therefore, to his inventive resources by the demands made upon

him, he thinks out a test which he may really consider just, or which,

by proving fatal to the suspected, may place alike his ingenuity and

the verdict beyond the reach of challenge. Such ordeals not only often

elicit true confessions of guilt by the very terror they inspire, so

that, according to Merolla, it sufficed for the Congo wizards to issue

proclamations for a restitution of stolen property under the threat of

otherwise resorting to their arts of detection, but they are valuable

in themselves to the shamanic class from being easily adapted to the

destruction of an enemy and offering a ready channel for the influx of

wealth. A comparison of some of these tests, which decide guilt not by an

appeal to the fear of falsehood, as an oath does, but by what is really

an appeal to the verdict of chance, will display so strong a family

resemblance, together with so many local peculiarities, as to make the

origin suggested appear not improbable.

Bosman mentions the following ordeals as customary on the Gold Coast in

offences of a trivial character:

1. Stroking a red-hot copper arm-ring over the tongue of the

suspected person.

2. Squirting a vegetable juice into his eye.

3. Drawing a greased fowl’s feather through his tongue.

4. Making him draw cocks’ quills from a clod of earth.

Innocence was staked on the innocuousness of the two former proceedings,

on the facility of the execution of the two latter. For great crimes the

water ordeal was employed, a certain river being endowed with the quality

of wafting innocent persons across it, how little soever they could swim,

and of only drowning the guilty.[233]

Livingstone mentions the anxiety of negro women, suspected by their

husbands of having bewitched them, to drink a poisonous infusion prepared

by the shaman, and to submit their lives to the effect of this drink

on their bodies; a judicial method strikingly similar to the test of

bitter waters ordained in the Book of Numbers to decide the guilt of

Jewish wives whom their husbands had reason to suspect of infidelity. The

Barotse tribe, in Africa, who judge of the guilt of an accused person by

the effect of medicine poured down the throat of a dog or cock, manifest

more humanity in their system of detection.[234]

But perhaps the best collection of African ordeals is that given in the

voyage of the Capuchin Merolla to Congo in 1682. In case of treason a

shaman would present a compound of vegetable juices, serpents’ flesh,

and such things to the delinquent, who would die if he were guilty, but

not otherwise; it being of course open to the administrator to omit at

will the poisonous ingredients. Innocence was further proved, if a man

suffered nothing from a red-hot iron passed over his leg, if he felt

no bad effects from chewing the root of the banana, from eating the

poisoned fruit of a certain palm, from drinking water in which a torch

of bitumen or a red-hot iron had been quenched, or from drawing a stone

out of boiling water. The crime of theft was proved by the ignition or

the non-ignition of a long thread held at either end by the shaman and

the accused, on the application of a red-hot iron to the middle. Among

the Bongo tribe a murder is often traced to its source, by making plastic

representations so closely resembling the victim, that at a feast given

with dances and songs the criminal will generally manifest a desire to

leave the company.[235]

So great in general is the dread of such ordeals, that they often

actually serve as the most potent instruments for the discovery of

crimes. In the kingdom of Loango was kept a fetich in a large basket

before which all cases of theft and murder were tried; and when any great

man died, a whole town would be compelled to offer themselves for trial

for his murder by kissing and embracing the image, in the fear of falling

down dead if they fancied themselves guilty. In the space of one year

Andrew Battel witnessed the death of many natives in this way.

In the Tongan Islands the king would call the people together, and,

after washing his hands in a wooden bowl, command everyone to touch it.

From a firm belief that touching the bowl, in case of guilt, would cause

instantaneous death, refusal to touch it amounted to conviction.[236]

Among the Fijians, distinguished in so many points from other savages

by originality of conception, the ordeal of the scarf was the one of

greatest dread, extorting confession, it is said, as effectually as a

threat of the rack might have done. The chief or judge, having called for

a scarf, would proceed, if the culprit did not confess at the sight of

it, to wave it above his head, till he had caught the man’s soul, bereft

of which the culprit would be sure ultimately to pine away and die.[237]

Among the ordeals of the Sandwich Islanders was one called the

‘shaking-water.’ The accused persons, sitting round a calabash full

of water, were required in turns to hold their hands above it, that

the priest, by watching the water, might detect, when it trembled, the

presence of guilt. On the Society Islands the ordeal only differed

slightly, the priest reading in the water the reflected image of the

thief, after prayer to the gods to cause his spirit to be present. The

mere report that such a measure had been resorted to often led to timely

restitutions of stolen goods.[238]

In Sardinia there is, or was, a well, the waters of which were supposed

to blind a person suspected of robbery or lying, if he were guilty;

otherwise to strengthen and improve his sight.[239]

The above instances, remarkable for their practical efficiency no less

than for their puerile ingenuity, suffice to illustrate the nature of

savage judicial ordeals and the extreme variety displayed in their

invention. The identity of many ordeals among different people, such

as that by fire or water, is probably due to the readiness with which

such tests would suggest themselves to the imagination. ‘He who, holding

fire in his hand,’ said the Indian law, ‘is not burnt, or who, diving

under water, is not soon forced up by it, must be held veracious in his

testimony upon oath;’ and the same was the idea in China and Africa as

well as in Europe. That these ordeals, like others, were originated by

the class of shamans, and were traditionally preserved by them as one of

the sources of their power, derives probability from their close analogy

to the judicial ordeals invented and administered by the priests of early

Europe. The trial by the hallowed morsel, which decided guilt by the

effects of swallowing a piece of hallowed bread or cheese; the trial by

the cross, when both accuser and accused were placed under a cross with

their arms extended, and the wrong adjudged to him who first let his

hands fall; or the trial by the two dice, when innocence was proved if

the first dice taken at hazard bore the sign of the cross—though they

may have been metamorphosed heathen ordeals, seem rather to have been of

pure Christian invention; nor are they distinguished in any point above

corresponding practices on the coast of Guinea, except in this, that they

were called the judgments of God, and implied some belief in a personal

spirit, who could and would control the verdict of chance to prove guilt

or innocence.[240]

As in Europe after the fifteenth century the oath of canonical purgation

gradually displaced the older system of ordeals, so it would seem that

in savage life too the judicial oath succeeds in order of time the

judicial ordeal. An oath implies a prayer, an invocation of punishment

in case of perjury; and a man’s conscience is evidently more directly

appealed to where his guilt is tested to some extent by his own

confession, than where it is decided by something quite external to

himself.

The witness in a modern English law court, invoking upon himself divine

wrath if he swear falsely by the book he kisses, preserves with curious

exactitude the judicial oath of savage times and lands. Our English

judicial oath, in use though no longer compulsory, has withstood all

attacks upon it, for the insuperable practical reason that the majority

of men are more afraid of swearing falsely than of speaking falsely, and

that the fewer scruples a man feels about lying, the more he is likely to

feel about perjury. The notion that one is morally worse than the other

is probably due to the imaginary terrors which, associated time out of

mind with perjury, have given it a legal existence apart, and made it, so

to speak, a kind of lying-extraordinary, a crime outside the jurisdiction

of humanity.

In Samoa, as at Westminster, physical contact with a thing adds vast

weight to the value of a man’s evidence. Turner relates how in turn each

person suspected of a theft was obliged before the chiefs to touch a

sacred drinking-cup, made of cocoa-nut, and to invoke destruction upon

himself if he were the thief. The formula ran: ‘With my hand on this

cup, may the god look upon me and send swift destruction if I took the

thing which has been stolen.’ ‘Before this ordeal the truth was rarely

concealed,’ it being firmly believed that death would ensue, were the cup

touched and a lie told. Or the suspected would first place a handful of

grass on the stone or other representative of the village god, and laying

his hands on it, say, ‘In the presence of our chiefs now assembled, I

lay my hand on the stone; if I stole the thing, may I speedily die,’

the grass being a symbolical curse of the destruction he invoked on all

his family, of the _grass_ that might grow over their dwellings. The

older ordeal of fixing the guilt upon a person to whom the face of a

spun cocoa-nut pointed when it rested, shows how ordeals may survive in

use after the attainment of judicial oaths and contemporaneously with

them.[241]