Chapter IX: Comparative Folk-Lore (4)

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.