On Radack Island a woman “is allowed to bring up only three children; her fourth and every succeeding one she is obliged to bury alive herself.”[55]
Two boys and one girl were all that the Australian mother brought up, according to Curr, although the women bore an average of six children.[56]
Economic ingenuity—and trepidity—could go no further than the practice in the Solomon Islands, where “a small portion of the Ugi natives have been born on the island, three-fourths of them having been brought as youths to supply the place of offspring killed in infancy. When a man needs support in his declining years, his props are not his own sons, but youths obtained by purchases from the St. Christoval natives.”[57] Another author says of the same islands that when “it becomes necessary to buy other children from other tribes good care is taken not to buy them too young.”[58]
At Vaitupu, of the Ellice Islands, “only two children are allowed to a family, as they are afraid of a scarcity of food.”[59] It is on these coral islands that Robert Louis Stevenson says the fear of famine is greatest. He bears out the statement that only two children were allowed to a marriage on Vaitupu Island, and adds that on Nukufetu only one child was permitted; “on the latter the punishment was by fine, and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid and the child spared.”[60]
In the Dieyerie tribe, of Australia, “thirty per cent. are murdered by their mothers at their birth, simply for the reasons—firstly, that many of them, marrying very young, their first-born is considered immature and not worth preserving; and secondly, because they do not wish to be at the trouble of rearing them, especially if weakly. Indeed all sickly and deformed children are made away with in fear of their becoming a burthen to the tribe.”[61]
With the coming of ritual, man assumes to pacify his voracious deities by the sacrifices of children, thereby propitiating the gods and reducing the economic burden. The people of the Senjero offer up their “first-born sons as sacrifices, because, once upon a time, when summer and winter were jumbled together in bad season, and the fruits of the field would not ripen, the sooth-sayers enjoined it.”[62]
After telling an almost unprintable tale, Dr. Brinton says of the Australian blacks that “among several tribes it was an established custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as it was believed to strengthen her for later births.
“In the Luritcha tribe, young children are sometimes killed and eaten, and it is not an infrequent custom, when a child is in weak health, to kill a younger and healthy one and then to feed the weakling on its flesh, the idea being that this will give to the weak child the strength of the stronger one.”[63]
Frank admission that the children are in the way and are a burden, may be regarded either as a sign that the tribe has progressed, or that it has not yet reached the point of shame where it cloaks the evil practice under the guise of religious sacrifices, hygienic or customary regulations.
In this regard it is not possible to say that the father, as opposed to the mother, is more inclined to do away with offspring, or is more frequently entrusted with that grewsome duty, although I would venture to say that an exhaustive research on this one aspect of the study would probably show that the mother at first opposed and gradually accepted, under the force of man’s will, the idea that the destruction of her offspring was good; first for herself and her lord and master, and secondly for the tribe.