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:—