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:—

With which may be compared the Tongan social scale:—

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.