Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/335

 Rh future. We talk of eugenics as if it were a new thing, but I suspect that it has a long history behind it. Simple communities such as those of the Nāga hills, as I think, do indeed recognise the social importance of these vital processes. Their recognition may at best be but imperfect, indirect, and subconscious. The rites they perform as organised communities in the active presence of these processes afford indications both of the nature of, and of the degree of intensity of, their feelings towards social phenomena. These rites are the outward expression of the faith that is in them. They are customary rites, and have therefore a peculiar extrinsic validity. As Hobhouse acutely remarked,—"At a low grade of reflection there is little room for doubting that at bottom custom is held sacred because it is custom. It is that which is handed on by tradition and forms the mould into which each new mind is cast as it grows up. Thus, while for society it is custom, for the individual it has something of the force of habit and more than habit." I seek to show that in this small area, where with all its diversity of custom there is substantial homogeneity of culture, the end which these rites serve is often consciously realised as a social end, beneficial to them as organised communities. We have views as to causality in the physical world which are not theirs. The means they employ have in our eyes no sort of quantitative or qualitative relation to the ends they seek to compass.

Nāga communities are simple in structure. Here and there are groups of villages in political subordination to one large and powerful village, but Meithei rule has broken up and put an end to such troublesome agglomerations. The village groups of Mao and Maikel offer something