Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/406

352 development and Western democracy at the other, they are absurdly wrong in thinking that they can carry the analogy into respective intelligence or even physical development. Speaking from observation I can say deliberately that the Australian blacks, when they are rationally treated, are capable of intellectual development—in one case also to my personal knowledge—of no mean order. As example of my use of the word rational let me instance the fact that the aborigines find it very difficult to understand any modern conception of individuality. The tribe is the norm of their social life, and they regard social offences in much the same way that the Israelites did when the law of the Goel was in force. You can readily see how the existence of such a misconception affects all the relationships between the blacks and whites in North Queensland. At Yarrubah we have frankly accepted the communistic principle, and the blacks find it not only possible but comparatively easy to pass to our modern conception of individual responsibility.

"With further reference to the subject of my conversation with you in Liverpool last year. We often have girls who are sent to the mission enceinte, and we never dwell upon any wrongfulness of their condition. We have no trouble afterward, neither have we found, at any rate for many years, that the girls persist in the belief, practically universal among the Northern tribes, that copulation is not the cause of conception.

"I was speaking this week to the Rev. C. W. Morrison (M.A. of Emmanuel College, Cambridge), who is Acting Head of the Yarrubah Mission. He told me that among the tribes around the Cairns district in North Queensland the acceptance of food from a man by a woman was not merely regarded as a marriage ceremony but as the actual cause of conception. Mr. Morrison also added that monogamy was the custom in these tribes, except in the case of sisters. This latter fact is borne out by my own observation. One aboriginal whom I know well married four sisters and stayed at that, but whether from principle or prudence I am unable to say."