Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

IV.
SAVAGE MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

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.