[49] The Religion of the Semites (1894), p. 267.
[50] Seeck (Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (1901), Bd. i, S. 200) reminds us how the ancient German player when he had lost in a game where the stake was his own liberty, honorably gave himself up as the slave of the winner.
[51] The Truth about the Congo (1907), p. 29.
[52] “Throughout tribal life the stranger is a menace; he is a being to be plundered because he is a being who plunders.... Native houses are often left for days or weeks, and it would be easy for any one to enter and rob them. Yet robbery among themselves is not common. To steal, however, from a white employer ... is no sin.”—Starr, The Truth about the Congo (1907), pp. 28 f.
[53] See VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
[54] On this subject see Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv, “Hospitality.”
[55] Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks, Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest ... was almost as great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life” (The Cults of the Greek States (1896), vol. i, p. 73).
[56] Without doubt other feelings and conceptions than purely ethical ones are sometimes operative in the case of the guest right. The stranger may be kindly treated because of superstitious fears. Thus the primitive man’s notions of magic and sorcery may cause him to be hospitable to the stranger through fear of the consequences of a refusal, since untutored people are apt to attribute magical powers to the stranger. See Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv.
[57] Among some uncivilized peoples, however, where the population is thin and there is little competition wars are unknown. “To the Greenlander ... war is incomprehensible and repulsive, a thing for which their language has no word” (Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, p. 334).
[58] Cannibalism springs from several roots. Sometimes savages eat the body of the enemy slain in battle because they believe that thereby they destroy the soul or double and thus secure themselves against its vengeance. Again the custom grows out of the belief that the virtues of the victim pass into him who eats the flesh. But the most common motive is the subsistence motive. Indeed, many of the incessant wars waged by primitive tribes are nothing more nor less than man-hunting expeditions for securing food. Later these expeditions became raids for securing slaves.