Should investigation uphold such an hypothesis, it would be easily understood how the frank acknowledgment represented an advanced stage, when the woman, no longer satisfied with the various trivial excuses offered for the destruction of her young, insisted on keeping them alive, and was met with, not the many invented reasons that we have seen, but the plain truth, that their continued existence endangered the food supply.

“Urgent want and sterility of the niggardly earth” were the reasons given by the natives of the island of Radnack for the law limiting the number of children.[64] A second child is killed among the natives of Central Australia “only when the mother is, or thinks she is, unable to rear it”[65] and yet the same authors say that “an Australian native never looks far enough ahead to consider what will be the effect on the food supply in future years, if he allows a particular child to live; what affects him is simply the question of how it will interfere with the work of his wife so far as their own camp is concerned; while, from the woman’s side, the question is, can she provide food enough for the new-born infant and the next youngest?”[66]

The long suckling time, that these authors and other travellers have noted, and that is here given as a reason, as opposed to the economic one, for the frequent killing of children, is due “chiefly to want of soft food and animal milk”.[67]

Among the members of the Areoi society, a peculiar and somewhat “secret” society[68] of the islands of the Pacific, “a man with three or four children, and this was a rare occurrence, was said to be a taata taubuubuu, a man with an unwieldy or cumbrous burden; and there is reason to believe that, simply to avoid the trifling care and effort necessary to provide for their offspring during the helpless period of infancy and childhood, multitudes were consigned to an untimely grave.” A Malthusian motive has sometimes been adduced, and the natives have been heard to say, that if all the children born were allowed to live, there would not be food enough produced in the islands to support them.[69]

From many authorities comes direct evidence of a clash between the man and the woman in the Polynesian Islands. “As the burden of the plantation and other work devolves on the woman, she thinks that she cannot attend to more than two or three children, and the rest must be buried as soon as they are born. There are exceptions to this want of maternal affection. At times the husband urges the thing contrary to the wishes of the wife. If he thinks the infant will interfere with her work, he forcibly takes the little innocent and buries it, and she, poor woman, cries for months after her child.”[70]

Among the nomadic tribes it is frankly admitted that the children are a hindrance. The Lenguas, of the Paraguayan Chaco, make journeys of from ten to twenty miles, the women doing most of the hard work. The consequence is that children are not desirable. So with the Abipones, of whom Charlevoix says: “They seldom rear but one child of each sex, murdering the rest as fast as they come into the world, till the eldest are strong enough to walk alone. They think to justify this cruelty by saying that, as they are almost constantly travelling from one place to another, it is impossible for them to take care of more infants than two at a time; one to be carried by the father, and the other by the mother.”[71]

ZULU GIRL WITH BABY. THE PRACTICE OF EXPOSURE
ENDED AMONG THE ZULUS ONLY WITHIN THE
PRESENT GENERATION

A HINDU CHILD-MOTHER, WHOSE CARES WILL MAKE HER OLD AT THIRTY