Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/129

 How diverse and changing are the moral rules is well known. Hence one example suffices to illustrate a morality differing from the present-day European.

Fridtjof Nansen gives us in the tenth chapter of his "Eskimo Life," a very fascinating picture of Eskimo morals, from which I take a few passages.

"One of the most beautiful and marked features in the character of the Eskimo is certainly his honourableness. …. For the Eskimo it has especial value that he should be able to rely on his fellows and neighbours. In order, however, that this mutual confidence, without which common action in the battle for life is impossible, should continue, it is necessary that he should act honourably to others as well. … For the same reasons they do not lie readily to each other, especially the men. A touching proof of that is the following feature related by Dalajer: 'If they have to describe to each other anything, they are very careful not to paint it more beautiful than it deserves. Nay, if anyone wants to buy anything which he has not seen, the seller describes the thing, however much he may wish to sell it, always as something less good than it is.'"

The morals of advertising are unknown for the Eskimos as yet. Certainly that applies to their intercourse with each other. To strangers they are less strict.

"Fisticuff fights and that sort of ruffianism is not to be seen among them.” Murder is also a great rarity, "and where it happens is not a consequence of economic quarrels but of love affairs.” They consider it dreadful to kill a fellow man. War is, hence, quite incomprehensible to them, and abominable; their language has not even a word for it; and soldiers and officers who have been trained to the calling of killing people are to them simply butchers of men.

"One of the commandments against which the Greenlanders oftenest sin is the seventh. Virtue and chastity do not stand in great esteem in Greenland. Many look on it (on the West Coast) as no great shame if an unmarried girl has children. While we were in Gothard two girls there were pregnant, but they in