Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/419

Rh are in the habit of reckoning up their men only, omitting the women altogether, and even the male children if still at the breast. Fear of taxation is another common motive for under-statement, especially in the presence of official inquiry. Every village has its chief; his office is partly hereditary, partly elective, and he himself is distinguished from his subjects by a uniform, to be worn, however, only on rare and special occasions — a fortunate circumstance in so warm a climate. He also bears a staff of office. These lesser chiefs are, again, under the orders of the headsman of the tribe, who has right to wear, when he chooses — a rare occurrence, let us hope — a general’s uniform, and to bear in his hand a baton of rule surmounted by a gilded knob.

Besides the "grand man" of their own "skin," in negro phrase, each tribe enjoys or endures the presence of a European official whom the colonial government appoints under the title of posthouder to reside among them, and whose duties chiefly consist in settling the frequent petty contentions that arise between the villagers themselves or their neighbours, regarding rights of property or land. Most other cases, civil or criminal, fall under the jurisdiction of the tribe itself, and are decided by the unwritten code of usage — often sufficiently barbarous in the punishments that it awards; though the cruelest of all, that of burning alive, is said not to have been inflicted on any one for a generation past. It was the penalty especially reserved for sorcerers, and its discontinuance is attributed to the fact that the sorcerers have themselves, like the witches of Germany or Scotland, disappeared in our day. The truth is that the negroes are less superstitious than of old, and having discarded the imaginary crime from their belief, have also discarded the real one by which it was supplemented from their practice —just as the erasure of heresy from the catalogue of sins was immediately followed by the extinction of heretic-burning faggots. The beneficent triumphs of rationalism, so ably chronicled by Mr. Lecky, are not confined to Europe and the European races, and the process of the suns brings wider thoughts to other men than the dwellers of the moorland by Locksley Hall.

Sorcerers, indeed, have, it is said, though from what cause I cannot readily determine, been of all times rare articles among the negro colonists of Surinam. So, too, though the large majority of the bush-negroes are yet pagans — as were their ancestors before them, when, cutlass in hand, they hewed out their way to freedom — obeah, so notoriously widespread throughout Africa, and, if report say true, not unknown to some West-Indian regions, is scarcely ever heard of among them. Yet, did it exist in any notable degree, it could hardly have failed, by the natural contagion of evil, to have established itself also among the creole blacks, their immediate neighbours and kinsmen, who are, however, in general remarkably free from any imputation of the kind. Nor, again, are the bush-negroes — nowadays at least — addicted to the indiscriminate fetish-worship so often described by modern travellers as prevalent in Africa. Perhaps they may have been so formerly. At present the ceiba or cotton-tree, that noblest forest growth of the West Indies, enjoys almost alone, if report says true, the honours of negro worship, avowedly among the maroons, furtively in the creole villages. I myself have often seen the traces of offerings — fowls, yams, libations of drink, and the like — scattered round its stem; the spirit-dweller of its branches, thus propitiated, is said to be of an amiable disposition; unlike its demon-brother of the poison-tree, or hiari, also venerated by some, but out of fear. Idols in the strict sense of the term they certainly have none; and their rejection of Roman Catholicism, a circumstance to which I have alluded before, is asserted to have had at least for its ostensible motive their dislike of the image-worship embodied in that system.

I would willingly indulge the charitable hope that the Moravian bush-negro converts may possibly have acquired some kind of idea of the virtue commonly designated, though in a restricted use of the word, by the name of morality. It is a virtue with which their pagan brethren are, in a general way, lamentably unacquainted. On principle, if the phrase may be allowed, they are polygamists; but the frequency of divorce renders, it is said, the dignity of a bush-negro’s wife more often successional than simultaneous. Indeed their avowed laxity in this and analogous directions is sometimes asserted, but how truly I cannot say, to be one of the chief hindrances to the increase of their numbers. Without going into the particulars of an obscure and unpleasant subject, thus much is clear, that a child which has for its parents "no father and not much of a mother," a normal condition of things in the bush-negro villages, must necessarily commence the infantile 