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.