The Child in Human Progress

It is therefore not surprising that we find among the Egyptians, just as we find among the Sumerians and the Akkadians, who were contemporaneous in civilization about four and five thousand years before Christ, that the attitude toward children is settled, and apparently in the child’s favour; for aside from occasional sacrificial offerings in which the child is on a par at least with the slave or the servant about to be sacrificed, there is no evidence of the endeavour to do away with the children on the scale that we find in ancient Greece and Rome and later in India and China.

Had there been, however, less positive division of castes in Egypt, the infants of the higher class would not have been as well treated. The lives of the military and priestly castes were almost sacred146; it was on them that the king relied for support, and the rest of the population, whether nominally free or slave, were foreordained to a life of incessant toil. Maspero quotes from the Sellier Papyrus, a satiric poem, which goes to show the conditions in the earliest time among these workmen whose lives of hardship were only varied by the irregular visits of the tax-gatherers. These visits, though dreaded, were never prepared for and were always the occasions of several days of protestations, threats, beating, cries of pain from the tax-payers, lamentations from the women and children, the gathering up of the tax, the departure of the tax-collectors and then the calm with the resumption of labour until the next visit of the collectors.

“I have never seen a blacksmith on an embassy,” so runs the complaint of the proletariat 3000 years before Christ,—“nor a smelter sent on a mission—but what I have seen is the metal worker at his toil,—at the mouth of the furnace of his forge,—his fingers as rugged as the crocodile, and stinking more than fish-spawn. The artisan of any kind who handles the chisel, does not employ so much movement as he who handles the hoe; but for him his fields are the timber, his business is the metal, and at night when the other is free,—he, he works with his hands over and above what he has already done, for at night, he works at home by the lamp. The stone-cutter who seeks his living by working in all kinds of durable stone, when at last he has earned something, and his two arms are worn out, he stops; but if at sunrise he remain sitting, his legs are tied to his back. The barber who shaves until the evening, when he falls to and eats, it is without sitting down—while running from street to street to seek custom; if he is constant (at work) his two arms fill his belly, as the bee eats in proportion to its toil. Shall I tell thee of the mason—how he endures misery? Exposed to all the winds—while he builds without any garment but a belt—and while the bunch of lotus-flowers (which is fixed) on the (completed) houses—is still far out of his reach—his two arms are worn out with work; his provisions are placed higgledy piggledy amongst his refuse, he consumes himself, for he has no other bread than his fingers, and he becomes wearied all at once. He is much and dreadfully exhausted—for there is (always) a block (to be dragged) in this or that building, a block of ten cubits by six,—there is (always) a block (to be dragged) in this or that month (as far as the) scaffolding poles (to which is fixed) the bunch of lotus-flowers on the (completed) houses. When the work is quite finished, if he has bread, he returns home, and his children have been beaten unmercifully (during his absence). The weaver within doors is worse off there than a woman; squatting, his knees against his chest,—he does not breathe. If during the day he slackens weaving, he is bound fast to the lotuses of the lake; and it is by giving bread to the doorkeeper, that the latter permits him to see the light. The dyer, his fingers reeking—and their smell is that of fish-spawn;—his two eyes are oppressed with fatigue, his hand does not stop,—and, as he spends his time in cutting out rags—he has a hatred of garments. The shoemaker is very unfortunate; he moans ceaselessly, his health is the health of the spawning fish, and he gnaws the leather. The baker makes dough, subjects the loaves to the fire; while his head is inside the oven, his son holds him by the legs; if he slips from the hands of his son, he falls there into the flames.”147

The matriarchal tendencies of the Egyptian Government also account for the fact that children, as a rule, were not only allowed to live but were better treated than they were among other peoples. Even the first Egyptians, although semi-savages like those inhabiting Africa and America, were different in their attitude toward women to such an extent that the Greeks were led into believing that in Egypt the woman was supreme. The husband entered the house of the wife instead of the wife entering his148 and this led to the children recognizing the parental relation through the mother alone.

To this matriarchal tendency may also be attributed the activity of Maskonit, the god who appeared at the child’s cradle at the very moment of its birth, and Raninit, who gave him his name and saw that he was properly nursed. With two such deities in the list of gods, obviously the creations of women and hardly those of semi-savage men, it was evident that the women were using their best supernatural means to protect childhood. Significant, too, may be the fact that these protecting deities were goddesses, for, as may be seen from the story of the ill-fated prince,149—there was always a chance that either the crocodile, the serpent, or the dog, might get the infant. In the possibility of death by either of the three, there was the memory of days when mothers were either less careful or had not much authority.

Such knowledge as we have of the kings of the Fifth Dynasty indicates that they were builders, but it was during this dynasty, in the reign of Tetka-Ra (about 3366 B. C.), that what has been described as the oldest book in the world, the Precepts of Ptah-Hotep, was written. In this remarkable document the first care of the author after a stirring picture of old age, for it is evident that Ptah-Hotep wrote in his old age, is to enjoin those who read, that by following in the ways of the fathers, the children will prosper. All through there are, as M. Chabas pointed out, evidences that it furnished the basis for many of the later injunctions of the Hebrews in regard to filial obedience:

“Bring up your son in obedience.”

“The son who receives the word of his father will live to be old because of it.”

“Beloved of God is obedience; disobedience is hated by God.”

The later injunction of Ecclesiastes, ix., 9, is found in the 18th rubric:

“If you are wise take good care of your house; love your wife and cherish her.”150

The husband and wife are frequently represented together at this time, and their attitude toward one another is most affectionate. In the group of M’Ayptah we see the Priest of Ptah in what to our modern understanding is a real family group, not unlike those the photographer of the congested districts in large cities is frequently called on to perpetuate. On the left of the Priest is his wife, Ha’tshepest, while on his right is his grown-up daughter. Two smaller figures represent a second daughter and the grandson of M’Ayptah.151 The prominence of women here in relations so affectionate is unlike anything that we find in other ancient nations, and argues the presence of a spirit different from that of most nations at the same stage of culture.

In the time of the Old Kingdom (from the Third to the Sixth Dynasty), a man had but one wife, who was the mother of his heirs, was in every respect his equal, and shared authority with the father over the children. The natural line of inheritance was through the eldest daughter, and the closest ties were through the mother.152

In the Adventures of Sanehat, a story written apparently at the time of Amenemhat I., the founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, Sanehat’s description of his reception in the court of the king, when the royal children were brought forth to join in the general celebration, would also indicate that there was no desire to show any preference to either sex.153

That human sacrifice lasted up to the Eleventh Dynasty154 is the belief of Messrs. King and Hall, who point to the excavations at Thebes, in the precinct of the funerary temple of Nebhapet-Ra-Mentuhetep and about the central pyramid which commemorated his memory. There were buried a number of ladies of his harim, who were without doubt killed and buried at the same time, in order that they might accompany their royal master to his new abiding place. With each of these ladies there was buried a little waxen human figure placed in a little coffin, the image being intended to take the place of the slave of the lady of the harim. As the ladies were not royal, real slaves were not killed for them, which shows that the idea of sacrifice even then had contracted until it was restricted to personages of the highest rank.

According to Porphyry, who quotes a work of Manetheo on Antiquity and Piety,155 the law permitting or ordering the sacrifice of men was repealed by Amosis. Amosis, it is said, ordered that waxen images be substituted. The excavators have found not only the wax images but those of later days, when wood and glazed faience as well as stone were used, the growing humanity of the age seeking in this way to progress from the primitive indifference to the death of others.156

Nowhere is there any evidence that among the Egyptians of the Old, and Middle or New period (that is from the Fourth Dynasty up to the Twentieth, or from about 2800 to 110 B. C.), children were ill-treated or suffered from any of the usual methods of getting rid of surplus progeny. It is true that the monuments are more given to warlike exploits than to revelations of social manners, but the conditions in early Egypt all seem to point to the fact that, living in a land of plenty, they had early passed beyond the stage when the life of the child was the first sacrifice to the god of necessity.

In this connection it must be said that the only direct evidence we have from the ancients is that of Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Cæsar, who visited Egypt in the course of his thirty years’ preparation for his historical work. In what he says of the punishment of those who killed their children, he is citing the ancient Egyptians before they came under the influence of the Greeks and Romans:

“Parents that killed their children, were not to die, but were forced for three days and nights together to hug them continually in their arms, and had a guard all the while over them, to see they did it; for they thought it not fit that they should die, who gave life to their children; but rather that men should be deterred from such attempts by a punishment that seemed attended with sorrow and repentance.”157

In another section of his work, Diodorus is evidently speaking of the Egyptians of his own day:

“The Egyptian priests only marry one wife, but all others may have as many wives as they please; and all are bound to bring up as many children as they can, for the further increase of the inhabitants, which tends much to the well-being either of a city or country. None of the sons are ever reputed bastards, though they be begotten of a bond maid, for they conceive that the father only begets the child, and that the mother contributes nothing but place and nourishment. And they call trees that bear fruit, males, and those that bear none, females; contrary to what the Grecians name them. They bring up their children with very little cost and are sparing, upon that account, to admiration: for they provide them broth, made of any mean and poor stuff that may be easily had; and feed those that are of strength able to eat it, with the pith of bulrushes, roasted in the embers, and with roots and herbs got in the fens; sometimes raw, and sometimes boiled; and at other times fried and boiled. Most of their children go barefooted and naked, the climate is so warm and temperate. It costs not the parent to bring up a child to man’s estate, above twenty drachmas; which is the chief reason why Egypt is so populous, and excels all other places in magnificent structures. The priests instruct the youth in two sorts of learning; that which they call sacred, and other, which is more common and ordinary. In arithmetic and geometry, they keep them a long time: for in this regard, as the river every year changes the face of the soil, the neighbouring inhabitants are at great difference among themselves concerning the boundaries of their land, which cannot be easily known but by the help of geometry.”158

Strabo also speaks of the Egyptians as exceptions, when he refers to the parents’ power of life and death over children: and others assert that while they were cruel toward the new-born of the Hebrews, they were kind toward their own.159

The early development of the belief in a hereafter, as it showed itself in the unusual care of the body of the deceased, also affected, without doubt, the attitude of the Egyptians toward their own progeny, if it did not affect it toward that of others; in dealing with the primitive and early peoples we must always realize that we can understand them only by the way in which they dealt with their own. Their kindness to their own, argued an advanced civilization—to test their degree of civilization by the attitude they took to the children of slaves or the children of servants, is to ask more of them than we can ask of our contemporaries.

In the desire to look after the future life, the Egyptians were exceptional, as their embalming showed. They lived in a salubrious country, they boasted that they were “the healthiest of mortals,”160 and so great was their horror that any one should mutilate the human form, that the paraschistes παρασχιστἡς who made the necessary incisions in the dead when a body was to be embalmed, became an object of execration as soon as his job was over. According to Diodorus Siculus, he was always assaulted by his own assistants, stones being thrown at him with such violence that he had to take to his heels in order to escape with his life.161

Perhaps it is a far cry, but it seems as though a people who made such preparations as the Egyptians did for the dead, would have been chary of causing the death of those who had sprung from their own loins. For the care of the dead was not confined to the noble and the wealthy alone—the lower classes were also affected by the desire for a proper kind of funeral, to the extent that enterprising people procured an old empty tomb, enlarged it, and let places out in it. Hither then, came the fisherman, the peasant, and the dancing girl—in death they were the equal of the king, for they were buried with ceremony, their bodies were placed where the tomb equipment might be by them—and thus with the king, the noble, and the wealthy, they waited the time that was to be.162

Among such a people it is hard to think that the death of even a child was treated lightly.163

Of the Egyptians after the conquest of Alexander we must write as of the Greeks; and in the matter of children it is important to note that a recently discovered papyrus, written in Greek in the year 1 B. C., shows how completely the foreign point of view had been absorbed in a land in which four thousand years yielded up not a single evidence of the assassination of children.

The papyrus is a letter from Illarion, whose home is at Oxyrhynchus, and who evidently has gone to Alexandria with other workmen. He has apparently not sent his wife many messages of affection despite the fact that she is about to have a child. When the other workmen are going to return home, he plans to stay in Alexandria, but he promises to send home some of his wages. The part of the letter that is most interesting to us is his injunction that if the child that is expected should turn out to be a female, it should be cast out. In the salutation, Illarion refers to his wife as his sister, marriages between brother and sister having been common in Egypt, and the term being one of endearment. The letter follows:

“Illarion to Alis his sister, many Greetings, and to mother Berous and Apollonarion. Know that I am still even now at Alexandria. I urge and entreat you to be careful of the child, and if I receive wages soon I will send it to you. When you bear offspring, if it is a male let it be, if a female expose it.

“You told Aphrodisisa, ‘Do not forget me.’

How can I forget you? I urge you therefore not to worry.

“Twenty-ninth year of Cæsar, Paune 23 (addressed). ‘Deliver from Illarion to Alis.’”164

CHAPTER VIII

CHILDREN IN INDIA—STORY OF THE MAHABHARATA—FEMALE CHILD DESPISED—A HUNDRED COWS THE PRICE OF A SON—RECORDS LEFT BY HISTORIANS OF ALEXANDER’S CONQUEST—ATTEMPTS BY BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO CHECK INFANTICIDE—WORK OF JONATHAN DUNCAN AND COL. ALEXANDER WALKER.

IN an examination of the attitude of early man toward the child, there could be no more illuminating study than that of the habits of our own ancestry, the so-called Aryan primitives.

Whether the cradle of the race was in India and spread from there throughout Europe, or whether the original habitat was Central Europe, the fact remains that the earliest records of the civilization of all of the races from the Indians and Aryans in Asia to the Celts, Teutons, Hellenes, Goths, and Italians indicate that they were a pastoral rather than an agricultural people and that while the family was the unit, the father was undoubtedly the supreme power that later marked the pater familias in Rome.

The mere absence of fish-hooks in the archæological remains and the fact that the Aryans were for a long time a fish-hating race (the word fish-eater used as a term of opprobrium by Herodotus, there being no mention of eating fish in the Vedas and only occasionally in Homer) go to show how limited was the food of that race. It is only as the various branches of the race developed that they came to know the art of fishing and the value of fish, a fact that is shown in the lack of a common name for fish in the Aryan tongues. The age of Homer was really the beginning of the Iron Age of the Aryan people, the culture of Italy and Hellas resulting from a “lengthened process of historical evolution” stimulated and developed by contact with the high culture of the Semites, which again was derived from the proto-Babylonian people.165

Up to this time in the struggle for existence of these semi-savages everything was sacrificed for war, and infanticide and human sacrifice were practised, there being reason to believe that even cannibalism was practised in Britain, if not by the Celts certainly by the Iberians.

Early Greek myths reveal a condition of society little different from that which the missionaries in recent years have found at Dahomey. Children were killed when they were not wanted; wives were bought and sold. The practice of breaking a bottle over the bow of a vessel is a survival of a savage practice of the vikings of binding a human being to the prow when the war galley was launched in order that the keel might be sprinkled with sacrificial blood.

Recent philological research corrected by archæological discovery has established the fact that the members of the Aryan race up to the time of the Homeric legends were nomad herdsmen who had domesticated the dog and wandered over the plains of Europe in wagons drawn by oxen. They knew how to fashion canoes out of the trunks of trees but with the exception of native copper they were ignorant of metals. It is extremely doubtful if they practised any agriculture. They collected and pounded in stone mortars the seed of some wild cereal, either spelt or barley. They recognized the association of marriage but they were polygamous. They practised human sacrifice and they retained after birth only those children that they could conveniently rear, or those male children who were regarded as necessary for the increase of the fighting forces of the tribe.

Upon the Dasyas, the dark-skinned, flat-nosed people who originally inhabited India, the Aryans triumphantly descended, eventually driving the Dasyas out of their lands. From the Rig Vedas we learn the nature of the Aryan conqueror. He was a warrior, but he was a prayerful warrior who prayed for health, a defensive armour, and a comfortable dwelling. There were frequent sacrifices to the gods and at all of the sacrifices interesting philosophical and sphagiological discussions took place. In his prayers he prayed for racy and healthy children, but he always prayed for boys and never for girls. His children were part of his scheme of wealth; they were his body and soul.166

The two great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are the two sources of information on this period. Written down when the art of writing became known about the year 800 B. C., these books mirror the life of the people for centuries further back. The attitude toward children can only be gleaned from such statements as that Bhishma, one of the heroes of the Mahabharata, was the eighth son of his father, and the first to be allowed to live. The deaths of the previous seven are explained on the ground that his father Shantanu, the King of Hastinapur, was married to Ganga, the river goddess, who had consented to be the wife of the King on condition that, no matter what he might see her do, he would ask no questions. When she, however, having drowned the seven, attempted to drown the eighth son, he was obliged to cry “enough,” thereby saving the son but losing his wife, who departed declaring that the previous seven sons had been seven of the deities, condemned to a fresh life for some venial sin, and had been released by her from their punishment by an early death.

With such a story recited as semi-religious doctrine it can easily be seen why there grew up early the feeling that there was no crime in taking the lives of those children who were regarded as unnecessary.

Bhishma takes a vow not to marry, in accordance with which he refuses the offer of Amva who revenges herself when she is born a second time, as Chikandini, the daughter of a great king. The epic opens up another view of the early Aryan attitude when it is stated that Chikandini, although a daughter, is allowed to live; but in order to accomplish this her mother hides her sex for twenty-one years.167

In the Sankhayana-Grihya-Sutra there is a long description of the ceremony of the Pumsavana (the ceremony to secure the birth of a male child) which with its earnest prayer for a male child, not only at the time of coition but again with much ceremony in the third month, shows that the female child was doomed to a most unwelcome reception at the very best. As we shall see later, these ceremonies were bound to produce, in the course of time, not only the practice of killing female infants without remorse but even the disgusting ceremonies that marked female infanticide in some places.168

The feeling of these people at all times about women is best expressed in the words of the ordinance of Manu: “Women are born to bear children.”169 The female child that escaped death had therefore a sharply defined life before it. It is a question, as Professor Gottheil suggests, as to whether it is a degeneracy that brings about the death of these infants in view of the life they would be obliged to lead. Girls were betrothed at three or four years of age and at seven had gone through the ceremony of marriage to boys of whom they knew nothing, and when those boys died they remained virgin widows. At one time it was possible for them to be taken to their boy husbands’ homes and in some instances they became mothers before they were eleven. Not until March 19, 1891, was a law passed in India prohibiting cohabitation before twelve.170

Vatsyayana, an ancient Hindu sage, author of the Kama-sutra, in which are given rules for the domestic life of the Hindus, mirrors the point of view of his time, about the first century, A. D. According to Vatsyayana parents were to show to their children all indulgence and freedom—until they were five. From five to sixteen they were to be instructed in the fourteen sciences and sixty-four arts, after which time the lord of creation was enjoined to become a householder.171

Of this early period there is plenty of evidence of human sacrifice which, even when it did not consist entirely of children, led to the slaughter of children. “There is no evidence,” as Professor Wilson says, “that the practice ever prevailed to the extent to which it spread through most of the ancient nations, or partook in general of the same character. They were in the main sacrifices of an expiatory nature performed in fear and intended to deprecate the anger of the gods.”172

Monier-Williams suggests that it is possible that human sacrifice was at one time part of the Brahmanical system and adduces the story of Hariskandra and Sunahsepa as an evidence of that practice.173 In this legend, Hariskandra, being childless, prays to Varuna to grant him a son, vowing to sacrifice him to the god. A son is born but the father does not keep his word, and when the son reaches the age of discretion he refuses to become a victim. From a starving Brahman he purchases a son for one hundred cows, but this victim escapes by being adopted by the priest Visvamitra who is a royal sage.174

In the Purushamedha, or the section of the Satapatha-Brahmana dealing with the human sacrifice, a large number of men and women are bound to eleven sacrificial posts, and after the necessary rites have been performed on them, they are set free and eleven animals are killed instead. That in times previous to this adoption human beings had been sacrificed, there is no doubt.

Despite all that can be said in favour of the Buddhistic religion and the reforms that it wrought, it is not possible to find that it made any change in the attitude of the Hindus toward their children or the practices of the day as did the religion of Christ and later the religion of Mohammed, one of which sanctified the child, while the other expressly forbade infanticide. Laying down the law that life was a period of suffering and humility, the Buddhistic religion still declared that Nirwana was not obtainable by those under seven, so that the life of the child did not take on any increased value under the new religion of Gautama.

It was natural that with no forceful check on infanticide contained in the new religion, the primitive idea so well planted should spread and become stronger rather than diminish. It is therefore not surprising that in the Manava-dharma-castra ascribed by Burnell175 to the period between the year 1 A. D. to the year 500, the daughter is placed very low in the scale of things human:

“184—Children, old people, the poor and sick, are to be known [to be] lords of the sky; an elder brother is equal to a father; a wife and son are one’s own body.

“185—And one’s own servants are one’s own shadow; a daughter is the chief miserable object. Therefore offended by these, one should always bear it without heat.”176

That infanticide was so common in the time of Alexander that it attracted the attention even of that Greek in his march of conquest through the country, is evident in the records that he brought back.

Q. Curtius Rufus relates,177 that on entering the kingdom of Sophytes, Alexander was astonished at the wisdom of the laws of this barbarian. According to Curtius and Diodorus, Sophytes was governor of a territory west of the Hyphasis while according to Arrian it lay along the banks of the Hydaspes.

“Here,” says Curtius, “they do not acknowledge and rear children according to the will of the parents, but as the officers entrusted with the medical inspection of infants may direct, for if they have remarked anything deformed or defective in the limbs of a child they order it to be killed. In contracting marriages they do not seek an alliance with high birth, but make their choice by the looks, for beauty in the children is a quality highly appreciated.”178

“These,” said Diodorus Siculus, “were governed by laws in the highest degree salutary, for while in other respects their political system was one to admire, beauty was held among them in the highest estimation. For this reason a discrimination between the children born to them is made at the stage of infancy, when those that are perfect in their limbs and features, and have constitutions which promise a combination of strength and beauty, are allowed to be reared, while those that have any bodily defect are condemned to be destroyed as not worth rearing. They make their marriages also in accordance with this principle, for in selecting a bride they care nothing whether she has a dowry and a handsome fortune besides, but look only to her beauty and other advantages of the outward person.”179

“A very singular usage,” says Strabo, “is related of the high estimation in which the inhabitants of Cathaie hold the quality of beauty, which they extend to horses and dogs. According to Onesicritus, they elect the handsomest person as king. The child [selected], two months after birth, undergoes a public inspection, and is examined. They determine whether it has the amount of beauty required by law, and whether it is worthy to be permitted to live. The presiding magistrate then pronounces whether it is to be allowed to live, or whether it is to be put to death.”180

As far as I have been able to discover, the first attempt made by the British Government and perhaps the first organized effort in the Eastern world to put an end to the murder of female children was in 1789 when the British resident officer of Benares, Jonathan Duncan, afterwards Governor of Bombay, authenticated from the confessions of a race called the Rajekoomars the existence of the custom. Sir John Shore, afterwards a witness in the trial of Warren Hastings, and later Lord Teignmouth, in an address to the Royal Society of Bengal in 1794 described how, after many suggestions, it was decided that the only way that the Rajekoomars could be moved was by getting them to sign an “engagement” binding them to desist “in future from the barbarous practice of causing the death of their female children.”

Inasmuch as that engagement was the beginning of the work in India and was afterwards used as a model for other engagements and reveals a curious attitude of mind on both sides, I reprint it in full:

“Whereas it hath become known to the Government of the Honourable English East India Company, that we, the tribe of Rajekoomars, do not suffer our female children to live; and whereas this is a great crime, as mentioned in the Brehma Bywant Pooran, where it is said that killing even a Fetus is as criminal as killing a Brahman, and that for killing a female, or woman, the punishment is to suffer in the nerk, or hell, called Kat Shootul, for as many years as there are hairs on that female’s body, and that afterwards that person shall be born again, and successively become a leper and be afflicted with the Jukhima; and whereas the British Government in India, whose subjects we are, have an utter detestation of such murderous practices, and we do ourselves acknowledge, that although customary among us they are highly sinful, we do therefore hereby agree not to commit any longer such detestable acts; and any among us (which God forbid) who shall be hereafter guilty thereof, or shall not bring up and get our daughters married to the best of our abilities among those of our caste, shall be expelled from our tribe, and shall neither eat, nor keep society, with us, besides suffering hereafter the punishments denounced in the above Pooran and Shafter. We have therefore entered into this agreement.

“Dated the 17th of December, 1789.”181

On May 27, 1805, Colonel Alexander Walker, the resident at Baroda, called the attention of the government at Bombay to the conditions in Guzerat, and the government authorized him to go ahead and use such measures as he deemed wise to suppress infanticide, sending him a copy of the engagement of Duncan as a suggestion of lines that might be profitably employed.182

It was while in the course of his investigations and work in suppressing the practice that Colonel Walker heard first from the Hindus the supposedly divine origin of the practice of putting female children to death. It was the supposedly divine origin and the fact that they acted within the observance of their religious duties that gave protection against interference from civil authorities. The Jharejas, a tribe among whom Walker made his investigations, informed him that the origin of the practice of infanticide came about through the fact that a powerful Raja of their caste, who had a daughter of singular beauty and accomplishments, desired his Rajgor or family Brahmin to affiance her to a prince of desert and rank equal to her own.183

The Rajgor, after much travelling, returned to the Raja and informed him that he was not able to find any one to meet the proper requirements. The Raja was so dejected over this that, according to the story, he finally consented to the Rajgor’s putting his daughter to death as the only means out of the difficulty; and from that time on, according to the Jharejas, female infanticide was practised throughout the land.184

There is much frankness in this explanation inasmuch as it was the difficulty of marrying their daughters in a way they considered properly that encouraged the practice. There is no doubt there had been a persistent warfare in the formative periods of the tribes, and when the warlike conditions made it impossible to marry the daughters advantageously, the daughters become a burden with the result that the practice of infanticide sprang up.

“The practice which prevailed in Europe,” says Colonel Walker, “and chiefly amongst the principal families, of placing their daughters in nunneries, might be traced to the same motives that led the Jharejas to put theirs to death; and both have originated in the desire of diminishing the cares and expense attending a numerous family.”185

That the practice, no matter how deeply rooted in the tribe, still leaves the decision with the father, is shown from the following explanation of putting the child to death:

“When the wives of the Jhareja are delivered of daughters, the women who may be with the mother repair to the oldest man in the house; this person desires them to go to him who is the father of the infant, and do as he directs. On this the women go to the father, who desires them to do as is customary, and so to inform the mother. The women then repair to the mother, and tell her to act in conformity to their usages. The mother next puts opium on the nipple of her breast, which the child, inhaling with its milk, dies. The above is one custom, and the following is another: when the child is born, they place the navel string on its mouth, when it expires.”186

We are further informed that “if a father wishes to preserve a daughter, he previously apprises his wife and family, and his commands are obeyed; if a mother entertains the wish of preserving a daughter, and her husband is averse to it, the infant must be put to death.”187

The heads of the tribes were consulted. Many of them declared that the women and children were well treated and pointed out the fact that the Hindu religion has always protected the female sex from violence and that it was unlawful to put a woman to death for any offence whatsoever. In support of this they quote the following Sloke verse, which is extracted from the Dhurma Shastra:

Walker also came across a tribe of Brahmins called Kurada. Their object of worship was a goddess known as Makalukshmee to whom human sacrifice was acceptable. Another name for their deity was Vishara Bhoot, a spirit of poison, a very amiable ghost inasmuch as it led to the poisoning of guests as sacrifices for this queen of another world.

Among these people the following story was told as giving the origin of the sacrifices of human beings:

“A certain Raja, having built a spacious and beautiful tank, found every effort to fill it with water impracticable.

“This greatly distressed the Raja, and having in vain exerted every expedient of devotion and labour the Raja at last vowed to his particular deity the sacrifice of his own child, provided this precious offering was accepted by the grant of his prayer.

“Accordingly the Raja directed one of his children to be placed in the centre of the tank, on which the deity instantly gave an undeniable testimony of his assent and gratification; the tank immediately filled with fine water, and the child was sacrificed in being drowned.”189

The records of the correspondence and the engagements for the next eighty years make interesting reading, especially the communications from the various princes protesting that inasmuch as they had killed their daughters for 4900 years it was an unfriendly act for the British Government to interfere with the practice or insist on discussing it. Showing their humanity and their right to be protected from interference in the matter of female infanticide, the Futteh Mahommed Jemadar, writing to Colonel Walker, protests that already “in this country, neither birds nor animals are killed, goats excepted, and but few even eat them; and charitable places for fakirs going and coming from Mecca, and Hindus performing pilgrimages, are so strongly planted that they suffer no annoyance.”190

In an interesting batch of correspondence, 1835, between the British political agent, J. P. Willoughby, at Kattywar and various Jhallas, Rawuls, Gohuls, and Surwyejas of this section of India, these sub-chiefs reply to the half-cajoling, half-commanding communications of the political agent that they will do their best to see that infanticide is stopped, plaintively informing the representatives of the British Government that in addition they will promise to bring up their own daughters. “Five months since,” says the Jhareja Dosajee, Chief of Paal, appealingly, “my brother, Jhareja Hurreebhyee, got a daughter, which he preserved. This I wrote for your information.”

In the brief time since 1835 there is evident the great change that has come over the spirit of the once proud sons of the East. The iron of the West has left its mark.

The Infanticide Act, No. 366 A, 14th of March 1871, organized and equalized the work and showed that the government was indeed resolved “to use every means in its power to eradicate the inhuman practice that any relaxation of the repressive measures now to be enforced will depend on the evidence that may be given of a disposition to reform.” Copies of the proclamation were affixed in conspicuous places at each tehseelee, police station, and village chopal in the proclaimed localities and with the employment of the registrar of midwives, the imposition of extra police under certain circumstances, and the fact that midwife and Chowkidar were both obliged to report where the proportion of the girls to the child population falls below twenty-five per cent.,191 an effectual check was put on the practice of several thousand years.

CHAPTER IX

SEMITIC DEVELOPMENT IN CANAAN—SACRIFICE OF THE FIRST-BORN PERSISTS—ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF SACRIFICE—THE CUSTOM WORLD-WIDE AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES—ASSOCIATED WITH CANNIBALISM—THE FOUNDATION SACRIFICE—DISCOVERIES IN PALESTINE.

IN treating of the Semitic race—a race that gave to humanity the Bible and the Koran, a race that founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—its attitude will be better understood if we approach it through the tribes whose religions and humanitarian ideas were eventually to become the religions and humanitarian ideas of the civilized world.

The beginning of the nation of Israel was the result of the frequent immigration into Palestine of Semites who fused with the aborigines and formed the Phœnician or Canaanitish people. From the time of Lugalzaggisi (about 4000 B. C.) there were successive Babylonian immigrations also, and from 1500 B. C. onward there were added to this mixture the Aramean tribes that had previously inhabited the highlands between the Mesopotamian Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Originally pure nomads, the Israelites after settling in Canaan became excellent agriculturists,192 and there developed the worship of Yahweh—“the worship of no other god contributing to the sum of humanity’s ethical ideas and spiritual conceptions a tithe of the value of that contributed by the worshippers of Yahweh.”193

These nomadic Semites when they settled in Palestine about 1000 B. C., after years of wandering, had many of the characteristics of a highly cultivated people but they also had the habits of the nomadic people that had originally come out of Arabia. Many too were the lapses into the ways of primitive people during the four hundred years of their wandering after their life in Goshen.194

If, as has been said, three generations without education would reduce the civilized peoples of today to savagery, the proneness of the Semites to fall back into godless ways may be well understood; so too one may well understand the protests and lashings of the prophets who saw their people retrograding.

When the Israelites began to write their own history they were a highly developed race in which there were few traces of early savagery, but the habit of sacrificing the firstling was a remnant of earlier economic stress that had passed into their religion. In order to understand the Israelite branch of the Semitic race and how it was possible for it to produce, on the one hand, the humanitarian ideas that rule the world today, when at practically the same time its leaders were protesting against savage sacrifices, but a step removed from cannibalism, one can do no better than to quote the eloquent and learned Chwolson, though his theory of the innate quality of a race is open to serious objections.

Commenting on the fundamental causes of the peculiarities of a people, one of which he says is the nature of “its heart and nervous system,” he thus describes the disposition of the Israelites195:

“In reference to the disposition (Gemueth) and organization of the nervous system: the Semite possesses a deep, easily excitable disposition, and is capable of mighty feelings; he is, therefore, lively, mobile, easily excited, passionate, quickly enthused for an idea, active and enterprising, flexible and adapting, easily finding himself at home in strange relations and circumstances, accommodating himself to them without difficulty, without, however, allowing of being absorbed by them.”

While, therefore, some of the Israelites developed in humanitarianism and poetry and religion, under the favourable conditions in Canaan, others, under various other influences, reverted to former practices. Among these practices was that of sacrificing the first-born child.

To understand better how the people who gave to the world the Child’s Friend retained so late the habit of sacrificing children, the scope of the custom must be understood.

The sacrifice of human beings to the gods, says Grimm,196 rested on the supposition that human food was agreeable to the gods and not until man had advanced did the idea come that substitutes might be offered. In the cannibalistic stage of development these sacrifices were eaten by the sacrificers, thus establishing a connecting link between the humans and the invisible gods whom they hoped to appease.

The whole theory of sacrifice will be better understood if we grasp the fact that it was born of fear. When a nation sacrificed out of gratitude or in apparent joyous exultation, it was in memory of days when they suffered and their gratitude was as much a propitiation as anything else. Born in fear, the next step in the development of sacrifice was to economize “without impairing efficiency.”197 The result of this second effort is seen in ingenious devices by which the burden on the worshipper is lightened by his substituting something less valuable than what he is supposed to offer, or what the god is supposed to want, but which the worshipper believes will be acceptable. These substitutions are always made when the forces of nature are treating man more kindly and when his attitude toward his gods is less fearful, for the mind of man in time of plenty and security has always presupposed that time to be when the gods are more or less drowsy.

With some primitive peoples, the sacrifice began as an offering of a meal to the ancestor who had gone before, but as with all primitive peoples the determining factor in religion is fear rather than affection, it became a method of soliciting favours for the future, and such were the sacrifices among the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews, the Aryans, and the Chinese.198

Primitive man, when unwelcome children were born, found easy excuse for getting rid of them by offering them as a sacrifice to the impatient and fearful gods. That at some stage in the development of the parental instinct the excuse that the gods must be propitiated was needed to quiet the awakening mother love, is more than likely. And surely, no more crushing answer could there be to the request to allow a child to live than that the gods were angry and had to be propitiated.

Another reason given for offering children was that, having just come from the other world, they were nearer to the gods and freer of sin and therefore more acceptable. Such reasoning argues a stage far in advance of the cannibal who ate his own children under the idea that he was propitiating an angry god. “The institutions of man develop with considerable uniformity all over the globe, although as races advance, they naturally diverge more or less under the influence of different climate, food, and other conditions.”199 Cannibalism was one of the earliest stages to which we are able to trace many of the customs even of today, and the idea of sacrifice of children undoubtedly had its origin in primitive cannibalistic feasts, “ceremonies that were softened by the rise of civilization as well as migration to more fertile land and an abundance of food sufficient to make the substitution of an animal for a human possible.”200

Among primitive people the sacrifice of children is common. In most cases there is some specific result that is desired when the child is sacrificed. In the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific, the sacrifice of the child is called nawgia and strangling is the method adopted, whenever it is found that the ordinary cures do not affect some sick parent. It is said that the natives watch the ceremony of strangling with much pity but that they feel it is better “to sacrifice a child who is at present of no use to society, and perhaps may not otherwise live to be,” than to allow a sick chief to die.201 On one occasion when the gods had been offended the native priests decreed that the child of Toobo Toa, the chief, should be sacrificed, “on such occasions the child of a male chief being always chosen as being worthier than others,” and a two-year-old child was strangled against the protests of its mother, who tried to conceal it.202

That the health of the Ynca also led to sacrifice of children is stated by Acosta:

“They vsed in Peru to sacrifice yong children of foure or six yeares old vnto tenne; and the greatest parte of these sacrifices were for the affaires that did import the Ynca, as in sickness for his health, and when he went to the warres for victory, or when they gave the wreathe to their new Ynca, which is the marke of a King, as heere the Scepter and the Crowne be. In this solemnitie they sacrificed the number of two hundred children, from foure to tenne yeares of age, which was a cruell and inhumane spectacle. The manner of the sacrifice was to drowne them and bury them with certaine representations and ceremonies; sometimes they cutte off their heads, annointing themselves with the blood from one eare to another.”203

Acosta also declared that when an ordinary man was sick and believed he would die, his own son was sacrificed to the Sun or to Virachoca.

Francisco de Jerez says that the Peruvian Indians sacrificed their own children and tinted the doors of their temples and the faces of their idols with the blood.