Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/23

 Rh and I exhibit this evening a curious collection of Indian stories, which was sent me some years ago by Captain Temple, who has, I believe, never published them. The first of these stories, at the place marked, is the story of the Judgment of Solomon. Of course, it will be held by the borrowing school that one story came from the other, India, I believe, having the greatest number of votes on the question of the original home. But if we consider the story on its merits, why need we trouble ourselves about the possibility of its being borrowed? If it shows the wisdom of the Hebrew king, it also shows his savage barbarity; because it is certain that the dénouement of the story rests upon the assumption that not only had he the power to kill the child by dividing it, but that he had the will and would have exercised it. The point of such a story would be entirely lost if it were told of one of our own judges, and the distance between the culture of Solomon's time and people and that of our own may be measured by this simple fact. But without the pale of civilisation such savagery as this is not singular; such a judgment as this is not confined to the typically highest wisdom, but extends to the typically lowest savage, because Mariner actually heard a similar judgment delivered by the savage king of the Tonga Islands to two of his tribe who were disputing the possession of a woman for wife, and they stopped the bloodshed which would actually have taken place just as the mother of the child did in Solomon's judgment. So that, given the necessary degree of savagery, the necessary indifference to the shedding of human blood, the necessary absolute power, and such a judgment would arise anywhere, and anywhen, and frequently.

Of course, along with the casualistic theory must be considered the possibility that the decadence of culture in any people would proceed back again to some of the stages from which it had previously developed. I advanced this argument some few years back in an article in the Archæological Review, and it has since received the adhesion of