Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/68

42 in their narratives, ap. Barron Field, New South Wales (1825). No tribal limitation here!

The difference between me and Mr. Hartland is that where he only sees in savage morals what Thrasymachus (in the Gorgias) calls "the interest of the strongest," I see also the Aristotelian φιλία, love. Perhaps "this is assumed in an airy way." I give my evidence. The affection breaks down, in cases, old men are put to death (Dawson), babies are destroyed. But the affection is there for all that. Of this I give a curious case from Brough Smyth. A native had stolen the sugar of a tribesman. Tribal law gave him the right to a smack at the thief's head with a waddy. He administered the blows, burst into tears, kissed the thief, and repeatedly drove the point of the waddy into his own head. Here is φιλία, and it is not absent from tribal morals. It is among "the good old ancestral virtues," as Mr. Howitt says of the savages (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xiv., p. 310) now vitiated by "the white man's influence." To what purpose reply that the blacks wage war and punish witchcraft? "It is lawful for a Christian man to bear arms," and, as to witchcraft, see Sir Matthew Hale. Concerning women, incest is immoral everywhere. It is only a question of what is regarded as incest. The savage rules are the germ of our own. "Not to interfere with an unprotected girl," a rule of the tribes, is a good rule anywhere. A judge on circuit lately, in Northern England, had to deplore the breaches of the rule. This rule does not merely "increase the authority of the elders." The pantomime dances of an obscene kind answer to the "Yah" ceremony, where the boys are taught "straightforward truth," by the converse example of humorous lying (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xiii., p. 444). To "tell the straightforward truth" may be inculcated merely in the interest of the strongest. Mr. Hartland may say so (he does not allude to it), but it is good ethics. The mode of instruction is odd