The Child in Human Progress

“Every historian ought to be a jurist; every jurist ought to be a historian,” says Ortolan, and the historian of child progress feels not only the truth of that statement but the added necessity of meeting the various economic theories that have dealt with the care of the child, from those of Lycurgus to the latter-day essay of Malthus.

The law of primogeniture and the varying laws of inheritance have occasionally led to the study of children as children, but generally the main interest in them of historian and jurist has been as a channel for the transmission of property.

Theories about population and the fascinating pursuit of unravelling tangled economic laws, have obscured the fact that the attitude of a state toward children has been, with few variations, an index to its social progress. The same thing has been said of women, but while the Greeks treated women well, yet with the exception of the single dema10 of Thebes, infanticide was common in all the Greek States.

The Chinese are kind to their women and yet there is no country today where infanticide is more common. The oldest civilization in the world, the Babylonian, was not one in which women were ill-treated, yet all the indications are that infanticide was practised in the shape of human sacrifice.

The Rajputs of India pleaded for their privilege of destroying infant children when theirs had been the highest civilization in the world.

In other words, disinterested affection for the infant is not necessarily coincident with civilization, or the kind treatment of women a sure sign that the lives of children are safe.

Various writers, including Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, and Edward Carpenter, have taken the attitude that our much vaunted civilization does not really represent progress, and one vivacious author11 has even undertaken to show in a clever and lively way that there is no such thing as progress, pointing to Greek civilization, in which children were killed at will and public men were confessed degenerates, as the ideal from which we of modern times have fallen away.

What is undoubtedly true is that civilization does not always indicate social progress, and what is truer is that civilization does not necessarily indicate the humanization of the people.

Chremes, the very character in Terence12 who says “Nothing human is alien to me,” is the one who reproves his wife for not having gotten rid of their child. The advance over Homer as shown by Virgil is that of a great gentleness, a great humaneness,—a difference in their times,—and yet Cicero, who represents the stoical and gentler sentiments of the Virgilian times toward the helpless and powerless victims of force as did no man up to his day, speaks tolerantly of the inhuman practices of his time. But there is a growth of humaneness from Homer to Virgil, there is advance from Plato to Cicero, humanely speaking of course; there was greater advance in the teachings of Christ, and there was further advance in the course of the long-drawn-out struggle between the nominal acceptance of those teachings and their incorporation into the daily philosophy. So, too, progress in the care of the rights of infancy and childhood has been made very little by very little.

It is the fact that, until 1874, there was no organized movement to defend the “rights” of children that led the author to investigate the conditions that had existed previous to that time. The first Child’s Protective Movement began in New York in the year mentioned, and the rapidity with which this spread throughout the world indicated that some general law, or as Brinton says, psychological process was at work. Today there are protecting societies in every country where there are Caucasian peoples. To go to the sources of the Child Protection Movement, it was necessary to understand the industrial conditions which arose in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, and the latter part of the seventeenth, when the boast was made that children were at last being made useful.

Back of the misuse of children in factories is the interesting story of the rise of modern industrialism with the early attempts of the guilds to protect children, not so much out of any development of the human feelings as from the guild’s desire to protect the male labourer from unfair competition.

The Decree of Napoleon in 1811,13 declaring that the unprotected infant was a charge on the state, marked another advance in humanitarianism; back of this advance was the long and interesting story of the endeavours of the religious orders and the charitably disposed persons of the Middle Ages to save the lives of children, the most conspicuous benefactor of childhood being the noble St. Vincent de Paul. It was he who gave to the golden glories of France’s golden age a touch of humanity that would otherwise have been lacking in the epoch ruled over by Mazarin and later the Great Louis.

Leading up to the efforts of St. Vincent de Paul was that complex and interesting chapter of the mixing of the old German laws with the Roman laws, as the barbarians found them.

That the semi-barbarous tribes that descended on Rome were better qualified to take up the humane side of the Christian work than was the decadent Roman, we can assume from the statement of Tacitus, that among the Germans children were treated more kindly than they were by the then ruling lords of the earth.

Satire there may have been, as Guizot and Voltaire suggest, in much that Tacitus wrote about the superior morality of the Germans, but later history demonstrated their ethical superiority over the nation that was then on the verge of moral decay.

In any case, as the Christian religion spread among the tribes that had enfiladed Rome, there are evidences of more humane consideration for children until we find Bishop Datheus as early as 787 A. D. founding an asylum for children in a spirit strangely in advance of his time, though the bitter protests of the Christian fathers in the second century against the slaughter and misuse of children put the mark of infamy on the persecutors of children for all time.

The Roman laws, as the barbarians found them, were the result of a slow growth of a thousand years from the time when the founder attempted to check the slaughter of young children by what must have been, in those primitive times, more or less drastic legislation. That the teachings of Christ and the teachings of the Stoics led to the same result does not detract from the credit due to Christianity for first putting on its proper basis, as we see things now, the standing of the child in the matter of its rights.

Back of the Roman developments is the Greek attitude toward children, disappointing, if we look for the perfection that we find in art and in philosophy, doubly disappointing when we find that both Plato and Aristotle saw the child only as a possibility—only as something of which we must await developments—only as a human ovum.

When we come to trace the attitude of other races, of other civilizations, toward children, we find much the same story: out of barbarism, civilization; out of civilization, humanity, though it has been usually the great Semitic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—that have awakened the humane instinct the world over. The humane teachings of the Stoics were not unlike those of the great religious teachers, but, lacking the intense driving power of religious fervour, it is doubtful if they could have accomplished the revolutions that these three religions did.

That all the great nations, the historical divisions of the races, or those that passed out of barbarism into civilization, carried with them some trace of early cannibalistic days or child-murder days, seems a safe conclusion; and while occasional followers and interpreters of the Malthusian philosophy have at times attempted to defend indirectly these practices as part of the checks and balances by which over-population is defeated, the fact remains that the development of the parental instinct, the greatest of civilizing forces, has slowly, but surely, tended to put an end to these “checking” and “balancing” practices.

CHAPTER II

HUMAN MARRIAGE—EVOLUTION OF THE PARENTAL INSTINCT—SOCIAL CONDITIONS AMONG PAPUANS—CHILD’S PLACE IN THE TRIBE.

IT is now believed by many scientists that the cradle of the human race was the Indo-Malaysian intertropical lands.

The discovery of the remains of the Pithecanthropus erectus in 1892 by Dr. Eugene Dubois in the pliocene beds of East Java, established as a strong probability what was up to that time regarded as a mere speculation. Keane14 and Sir John Evans15 now assert that man originated in the East in this vicinity and migrated thence to Europe.

In this semi-glacial period, man, having taken on much of his human character and being now an erect animal (although in physical and mental respects he still resembled his nearest kin), had little difficulty in migrating.

During the immensely long old Stone Age to which Peroché assigns a period of some three hundred thousand years since the beginning of the Ghellian epoch, the pleistocene precursors underwent very few or slight specializations or developments, a fact due mainly to the moderate and unchanging character of the climate during this long period. Progress in the arts, however, there was, to such an extent that in some things the period has not been equalled. Of this character are the exquisitely wrought flints of the Silurian period, which cannot be reproduced now.

Primitive man as he existed in the Stone Age had very little in common with the “primitive men” of today. There are savages today who represent, in a way, a degree of savagery and a remoteness from civilization that in some respects takes them farther down the social ladder than any of the Aryan race of the Stone Age. “No pure primitive race exists in any part of the world today.”16 Contact with more advanced races has invariably produced, sometimes a good and sometimes an evil effect. Races are what climate, soil, diet, pursuits, and inherited character make them,17 and the Aryan savages of the Stone Age had a different set of these conditions to face from the Negro savages of today.

It is not surprising to find today a race that in many respects represents the Stone Age period of civilization, displaying, together with the most barbarous customs, a wide knowledge of the arts, indicating that there had been contact with some higher race or its representatives.

Tribes grade into one another in the matter of culture so that it is hard to classify them.18 A struggle for existence may leave its mark on an advanced tribe so that while it may in general retain prominent barbaric or primitive characteristics, it will, in every other regard but these, seem an advanced tribe. The Nigritans, for instance,19 have learned from their neighbours, the Abyssinians and the Arabs, the use of iron; yet they have not arrived at the Stone and Bronze ages in culture, and show in their social relations and domestic habits none of the characteristics of the more advanced tribes.

So in the treatment of children. Wherever the treatment of the child is at variance with the other customs or conditions of the race, it will almost invariably be discovered that the change is due to economic reasons or to contact with a stronger race. That it is this contact with higher races that has helped undeveloped races to advance, is the opinion of Sir H. H. Johnson.20

“In some respects I think the tendency of the Negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one. As we come to read the unwritten history of Africa by researches into languages, manners, customs, traditions, we seem to see a backward rather than a forward movement going on for some thousand years past—a return towards the savage and even the brute. I can believe it possible that, had Africa been more isolated from contact with the rest of the world, and cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human.”

On the other hand, G. Stanley Hall says that our intercourse with the African races “had been a curse and not a blessing. Our own Indians are men of the Stone Age whom Bishop Whipple thought originally the noblest men on earth. Look at them now!”21

Up to a short time ago men of authority asserted that marriage had sprung up from a “state of promiscuity,” the believers in this theory forgetting that even “among animals the most akin to man, this state of promiscuity is rather exceptional.”

Most of the people cited as following this practice have been shown to have individual marriage to the exclusion of other forms. Undoubtedly in many cases what are called group marriages have been mistaken for promiscuity. Almost equally low in the social scale is polyandry, where one woman may have several husbands.

Whatever the origin of marriage, the fact is, however, that the idea of marriage comes after the idea of the child—as in the animal world, the family is established for the purpose of taking care of the children that have been brought into the world.22

In Mahabharata, the Indian poem, we are told that marriage was founded by Swetaketu, son of the Rishi Uddalaka; according to the Chinese annals, the Emperor Fou-hi established the custom; the Egyptians ascribed its introduction to Menes, and the Greeks to Kekrops. Nowhere is it assumed as a condition of the race of all time. Its origin, growth, and development are really the origin, growth, and development of the idea of protecting human offspring.

A convincing scientific explanation of marriage, however, has been set forth by Westermarck.23 Among the great sub-kingdom of the Invertebrata not even the female parent exhibits any anxiety about the offspring. The heat of the sun hatches the eggs of the highest order, the insects, and in most cases the mother does not even see her young.24

Parental care is rare among the lowest vertebrata. Among fishes the young are generally hatched without the assistance of the parents. There are exceptions to this among the Teleostei, where the male assumes the usual maternal functions of constructing a nest and jealously guarding the ova deposited there by the female. The male of certain species of the Arius, carries the ova in his pharynx. Nearly all of the reptiles, having placed their eggs in a convenient sunny spot, pay no more attention to them.

With few exceptions, the relations of the sexes of the lower vertebrata can be described as fickle; they meet in the pairing time, part again, and have little more to do with one another.

“The Chelonia form,” says Westermarck, “with regard to their domestic habits, transition to the birds, as they do also from a zoölogical and particularly from an embryological point of view.” He then goes on to show that parental affection in the latter class, not only on the side of the mother but on that of the father, has come to high development. Members of the two sexes aid each other in nest-building, the females bringing the materials and the males doing the work. Other duties which come with the mating season are shared by both, the mother being concerned with incubation and the father aiding her by taking her position when she leaves the nest for intervals, providing her with food which he gathers, and protecting her from dangers. When the breeding season is over and the young have come, a new set of duties is evolved. Young birds are not left alone by their parents, absences being necessitated only by searches for food for all members of the nest. When dangers threaten the nest both father and mother defend it bravely.

All efforts are made to have the young shift for themselves as soon as they have grown strong enough to make it feasible. Independence and self-dependence come only after they are in all ways capable of meeting their needs.

On the other hand, there are some species whose young, from the beginning of their ultra-oval existence, require and receive no care from the parents. The duck is one of a species which leaves all parental care to the female. In general it may be said that both parents share the parental duties, the chief duties, such as hatching and rearing of the young, falling to the mother, while the father gathers food and keeps off enemies.25

The relations of the two sexes are, therefore, very intimate, and association lasts even after the breeding season has passed. And only the birds of the Gallinaceous family are an exception to the rule of making such association permanent once it has been started, death alone ending it.

Real marriage is to be found only among birds.26 For mammals the same cannot be said, for though the mother generally gives much attention to the young, the father does not always have as much concern. He even, in some cases, is the enemy of his own offspring. Yet even in the cases of mammals there are durable associations between the sexes. Very often these last only during the rutting season, but among whales, seals, hippopotami, the Cervus campestris,27 gazelles,28 the Neotragus Hemprichii and other small antelopes, reindeer, the Hydromus coypus, squirrels, moles, the ichneumon, and certain carnivorous animals, among the latter cats, martens, the yaguarundi of South America, and the Canis Brasiliensis and perhaps the wolf, there are durable matings. Association between the sexes is common among all of these animals for periods after the young have been born. And in all cases the male is the family’s protector.

What is an exception among the lower mammals is, however, a rule among the Quadrumana. According to the natives of Madagascar some species of Prosimii are nursed by both male and female in common. Among the Arctopitheci the female is always assisted by the male in taking care of the young.

Coming to the man-like apes, we are told by Lieutenant de Crespigny that “in the northern part of Borneo they live in families—the male, female, and young one. On one occasion,” he says, “I found a family in which were two young ones, one of them much larger than the other, and I took this as a proof that the family tie had existed for at least two seasons. They build commodious nests in the trees which form their feeding-ground, and, so far as I could observe, the nests, which are well lined with dry leaves, are occupied only by the female and young, the male passing the night in the fork of the same or another tree in the vicinity. The nests are very numerous all over the forest, for they are not occupied above a few nights, the mias (or orang-utan) leading a roving life.”

Dr. Savage says that the gorillas live in bands and that but one male is seen in every band. M. du Chaillu says that the male gorilla is always accompanied by the female.

It is among the Negritians of Africa that we find today the at-hand evidence of the attitude of man toward his progeny in the first stages of culture, or perhaps the last stages of savagery. It must be remembered that in Africa, however, habits of other races will be found grafted on the negro stock, thereby causing them to appear sometimes unusually gentle or again unusually advanced. In Africa the Semitic and the Hamitic grafts on negro stock provide many varieties of mankind, just as in Oceania, the Mongol (Malay) and the Caucasian (Indonesian) grafts on the negro stock have produced many varieties there. As an example of the methods of the lowest of savage tribes, there is, however, no better example than the Papuans of New Guinea of whom the ethnologist, Keane, says: “They stand in some respects on the lowest rung of the social ladder.”

As an example of the low state of culture in which part of them exist it is said that those near Astrolabe Bay on the north-west coast of New Guinea had no knowledge of the metals, all their implements being of stone, wood, or bones; neither had they knowledge of fire, the grandfathers of the present generation being able to recall the time when they had no fire at all, but ate their food raw. In the study of these people we are studying contemporaries of our own neolithic ancestors.

According to their most popular myth, a crocodile named Nugu was responsible for the frequent disappearance of children until the tribe made an agreement to supply him with pig’s fat instead. Here we have the beginning of the theory of sacrifice.

“In their treatment of children they are often violent and cruel,” says Alfred Russell Wallace,29 and an example of their idea of kindness may be gathered from the following description of the “ornamentation” of a young Papuan:

“The faces of both men and women are frequently ornamented all over with cicatrices either circular or chevron-shaped. The operation is a painful and costly one, as the professional tattooer has to be highly paid for his trouble, and not every child’s friends can afford the fee demanded. The instrument used is the claw of the flying-fox. The unfortunate patient is not allowed to sleep for two or three nights before the operation is performed, and then, when he is ready to drop from weariness, the tattooer begins his work, and completes it at one sitting. I never saw the actual process, but a child was brought for my inspection whose face had just been finished off. It was in a painful state of nervous irritation, and the face swelled to an enormous size.”30

Of the condition of these people no one is better able to speak than Lieutenant Governor J. H. P. Murray,31 who describes tribes where the savages have only weapons of wood, know nothing of the bow and arrow, and are noted for their immorality.

“It is very often the case that the best of the young girls are sold by their parents as courtesans, the native name being Jelibo. I came across men married, and possessing, in addition, these women. Young fellows, not having reached puberty, had clubbed together in parties of three and four, and bought young girls from the parents to make courtesans. At feasts, these girls are used for the purpose of enriching themselves and their owners.”32

As to the attitude of the children, we gain some idea of the aboriginal point of view by this statement:

“There are some villages in which children absolutely swarm, but there are few large families; practically every one is married, but there are many couples who have no children, or only one or two. In many parts of the territory it is considered a disgrace for a woman to have a child until she has been married at least two years; infanticide and abortion, though rarely proved, are said to be common, and a medical expert would probably discover the existence of other checks to population. The result of all this is that in some districts the population is increasing while in others it is not; such investigations as we have been able to make lead, in the absence of definite statistics, to the conclusion that the population in that part of the territory which is under control is certainly not diminishing, though the increase, if any, is probably very small. The reason why the population does not increase as one would expect now that village warfare has ceased is, as far as I can see, simply that neither men nor women want children, which I take to be the chief cause that limits population elsewhere. The reason why they do not want them is, I think, partly because they find them a nuisance (which is a consideration that was probably effective even before the white man came) and partly that, in their present state of transition from one stage of development to another, they do not exactly see what there will be for their children to do.”

Another custom of these people is to bury children alive, when the parents or some person of importance dies; the excuse given for this practice is that the child will be needed to wait on the parent in the other world, a practice that lasted long among the civilized Egyptians.

Cannibalism is rife among these people. Mr. Murray reports that on one occasion a young man was brought before him for having murdered a man in order to please a married woman with whom he was in love—a lover who has not “killed his man” being considered lukewarm.

“On my remonstrating with him on the impropriety of paying attention to a married woman he informed me that there were no girls in the village, as they had all been killed and eaten in a recent raid. The position of a young man who found himself in a village where all the women were either married or eaten was no doubt a difficult one, and I hope that I took it into consideration in passing sentence.”33

How little is the feeling among these people over the murder of children, is shown from the fact that murder is the only outlet for their feelings!

“I have known cases where a man, grieving over the loss of a relative or over some slight that has been put upon him, has set fire to his house, quite regardless of whether any one was inside, with the result, occasionally, that a child is burnt to death, and I recently tried a case of murder which was the direct outcome of grief over the death of a pig. The prisoners were brothers, and their pig bore the pretty name of Mehboma; but Mehboma died, and the brothers in their unquenchable grief went forth and killed the first man they saw. The victim had nothing to do with Mehboma’s death, but the mourning brothers did not care for that—somebody had got to be killed over it. The prisoners told me that it was the custom of the village to show their grief in this way, so that their neighbours must occasionally have suffered rather severely.”34

As the Australians are closely allied to the Papuans and represent about the same period of culture, we may postulate their attitude toward woman and a marriage from the description of an early Victorian tribe-marriage given by Brough Smith and quoted by A. H. Keane, the latter author remarking that “a common test of a people’s culture is the treatment of their women, and in this respect the Australians must, as Prof. R. Semon shows, be ranked below the Bushman and on a level with the Fuegians.”

“A man having a daughter of thirteen or fourteen years of age,” says Mr. Smith in his description of the marriage customs in vogue among the Victorian tribes, “arranges with some elderly person for the disposal of her; and, when all are agreed, she is brought out and told that her husband wants her. Perhaps she has never seen him but to loathe him. The father carries a spear and a waddy, or tomahawk, and, anticipating resistance, is thus prepared for it. The poor girl, sobbing and sighing, and muttering words of complaint, claims pity from those who will show none. If she resists the mandates of her father, he strikes her with his spear; if she rebels and screams, the blows are repeated; and if she attempts to run away, a stroke on the head from the waddy or tomahawk quiets her. The mother screams and scolds and beats the ground with her kan-nan (fighting-stick); the dogs bark and whine; but nothing interrupts the father, who, in the performance of his duty, is strict and mindful of the necessity of not only enforcing his authority, but of showing to all that he has the means to enforce it. Seizing the bride by her long hair he drags her to the home prepared for her by her new owner. Further resistance often subjects her to brutal treatment. If she attempts to abscond, the bridegroom does not hesitate to strike her savagely on the head with his waddy, and the bridal screams and yells make the night hideous.”35

CHAPTER III

THE KILLING OF TWINS—OTHER EXCUSES FOR INFANTICIDE—RESTRICTING THE FAMILY—ECONOMIC REASONS ACKNOWLEDGED—DYING OF DESPAIR.

IT has seemed necessary to dwell thus at length on the conditions among the Papuans and allied tribes as it appeared to me important that the very beginnings of the family should be understood. The general agreement of ethnologists as to the low standing of the Papuans justifies, I believe, our assuming them to be as near the point of culture of our neolithic (or paleolithic) ancestors as it is possible to come.

From now on the course is upward. Strange as it may seem, the lowest tribes are less “human,” both in the matter of offspring and in the matter of sentiment of love for women, than some of the beasts and birds,36 but having touched that depth, the next step brings us in contact with feelings that, in a way, begin to approximate our own.

In the stages above the Papuans there is some affection for the woman; her position is nearer to that of wife and less that of captive. In consequence there is a more kindly regard for the children that she bears. Now begins the development of the parental affection. It is, however, confined to the female at first; “to this fact, rather than to doubt of paternity, should we attribute the very common habit in such communities of reckoning ancestry in the female line only.”37

Man, no longer relying on his own cannibalistic brute force to do with his progeny as he wishes, invents reasons for doing away with his burdensome offspring.

We have already seen that the Papuans restricted their families to two children, when it was possible. As late as the middle of the seventeenth century, Dapper reported that in Benin no twins were found, as it was regarded as a sign of dishonour for a woman to have twins.38

Among the Arunta tribes in Central Australia, twins are “immediately killed as something which is unnatural.”39 Among northern tribes they “are usually destroyed as something uncanny.”40 With the Kaffirs, it was found that “when twins are born, one is usually neglected and allowed to die.”41 Of the western Victorian tribes we learn that “twins are as common among them as among Europeans; but as food is occasionally very scarce and a large family troublesome to move about, it is lawful and customary to destroy the weaker twin child, irrespective of sex.”42

In some parts of the Benin territory, according to a contemporary of Dapper, the twin-bearing women are treated very badly.

According to Nyendael, they actually kill both mother and infants, and sacrifice them to a certain devil, which they fondly imagine harbours in a wood near the village. “But if,” says this authority, “the man happens to be more than ordinarily tender, he generally buys off his wife, by sacrificing a female slave in her place; but the children are without possibility of redemption obliged to be made the satisfactory offerings which this savage law requires. In the year 1699, a merchant’s wife, commonly called ellaroe or mof, lay-in of two children, and her husband redeemed her with a slave, but sacrificed his children. After which I had frequent opportunities of seeing and talking with the disconsolate mother, who never could see an infant without a very melancholy reflection on the fate of her own, which always extorted briny tears from her. The following year the like event happened to a priest’s wife. She was delivered of two children, which, with a slave, instead of his wife, he was obliged to kill and sacrifice with his own hands, by reason of his sacerdotal function; and exactly one year after, as though it had been a punishment inflicted from heaven, the same woman was the second time delivered of two children, but how the priest managed himself on this occasion I have not been informed, but am apt to think that this poor woman was forced to atone for her fertility by death. These dismal events have in process of time made such impressions on men, that when the time of their wives’ delivery approaches, they send them to another country; which makes me believe that for the future they will correct these inhumanities.”43

On the west coast of Africa “twins are killed among all the Niger Delta tribes, and in districts out of English control the mother is killed too,”44 which shows the fanatic point to which a belief, or rather an excuse, founded on the economic desire to keep down the size of a family, may be carried.

All Kaffir children are neglected, according to Kidd,45 but on the birth of twins, “one frequently is killed by the father, for the natives think that unless the father places a lump of earth in the mouth of one of the babies, he will lose his strength.”

The next provision to keep down the “cost of living” is directed against children with blemishes, a practice that was not easy to check even among civilized peoples. Among the Australian aborigines “it is usual to destroy those that are malformed.”46 Among certain tribes on the west coast, children whose mothers have died are thrown into the bush, “as are all children who have not arrived in this world in the way considered orthodox or who cut their teeth in an improper way.” A child born with teeth is put to death, in some parts of Africa; children born in stormy weather are destroyed in Kamchatka.47 In Madagascar “the superstition of lucky and unlucky days prevailed throughout all the tribes, and the unfortunate infants that came into the world on one of these unlucky days were immediately destroyed.”48

How obvious are the so-called reasons for killing the children may be seen from the fact that according to another authority, the proscribed or unlucky periods and days include all children born in March and April, or in the last week of each month, or on Wednesdays and Fridays.49 Among the Antankarana tribes of the Amber Mountains in Madagascar, a child that sneezes at or shortly after its birth is exposed. Among the Basuto, when a child is born with its feet first, it is killed,50 whereas among the Bondei it is killed if it is born head first.51

Among the Bondei, the excuses found for killing children are many. If the child is born head first, it is a kigego (unlucky child) and is strangled; if it cries, it is a kigego and is strangled. If the father has not been in the galo (kekutoigwa), or the mother has not been in the kiwanga (kekuviniwa) (initiated), the child is a tumbwi (offence) and is strangled.”52

Mental processes the world over are much the same. The American legislator raising the tariff to keep out competitors is not employing a system entirely dissimilar from that of the barbarians who, finding the first proscriptions fail to keep down the birthrate, widen the scope of the proscription. And so the customary law grows to include female children among the proscribed. Writing in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Don Felix de Azara declared he had found that among the Guanas in South America it was the custom for the women to bury alive the majority of the female children, and that they never brought up more than one boy and one girl.53

Rude attempts to regulate the number of children next appeared. It has been suggested that this phase of primitive development argues mentality sufficient to foresee destruction of the tribe that does not provide for the future. Doubtless, in the mind of some savage Malthus, the idea that the tribe must allow at least a given number of children to live, was conceived with the warm glow of discovery.

Among the Tokelaus, or Line Islanders, “no married pair are allowed by their law to have or bear more than four children; that is, only four get the chance of life. The woman has a right to rear, or endeavour to rear, one child. It rests with the husband to decide how many more shall live, and this depends on how much land there is to divide.”54

On Radack Island a woman “is allowed to bring up only three children; her fourth and every succeeding one she is obliged to bury alive herself.”55

Two boys and one girl were all that the Australian mother brought up, according to Curr, although the women bore an average of six children.56

Economic ingenuity—and trepidity—could go no further than the practice in the Solomon Islands, where “a small portion of the Ugi natives have been born on the island, three-fourths of them having been brought as youths to supply the place of offspring killed in infancy. When a man needs support in his declining years, his props are not his own sons, but youths obtained by purchases from the St. Christoval natives.”57 Another author says of the same islands that when “it becomes necessary to buy other children from other tribes good care is taken not to buy them too young.”58

At Vaitupu, of the Ellice Islands, “only two children are allowed to a family, as they are afraid of a scarcity of food.”59 It is on these coral islands that Robert Louis Stevenson says the fear of famine is greatest. He bears out the statement that only two children were allowed to a marriage on Vaitupu Island, and adds that on Nukufetu only one child was permitted; “on the latter the punishment was by fine, and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid and the child spared.”60

In the Dieyerie tribe, of Australia, “thirty per cent. are murdered by their mothers at their birth, simply for the reasons—firstly, that many of them, marrying very young, their first-born is considered immature and not worth preserving; and secondly, because they do not wish to be at the trouble of rearing them, especially if weakly. Indeed all sickly and deformed children are made away with in fear of their becoming a burthen to the tribe.”61

With the coming of ritual, man assumes to pacify his voracious deities by the sacrifices of children, thereby propitiating the gods and reducing the economic burden. The people of the Senjero offer up their “first-born sons as sacrifices, because, once upon a time, when summer and winter were jumbled together in bad season, and the fruits of the field would not ripen, the sooth-sayers enjoined it.”62

After telling an almost unprintable tale, Dr. Brinton says of the Australian blacks that “among several tribes it was an established custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as it was believed to strengthen her for later births.

“In the Luritcha tribe, young children are sometimes killed and eaten, and it is not an infrequent custom, when a child is in weak health, to kill a younger and healthy one and then to feed the weakling on its flesh, the idea being that this will give to the weak child the strength of the stronger one.”63

Frank admission that the children are in the way and are a burden, may be regarded either as a sign that the tribe has progressed, or that it has not yet reached the point of shame where it cloaks the evil practice under the guise of religious sacrifices, hygienic or customary regulations.

In this regard it is not possible to say that the father, as opposed to the mother, is more inclined to do away with offspring, or is more frequently entrusted with that grewsome duty, although I would venture to say that an exhaustive research on this one aspect of the study would probably show that the mother at first opposed and gradually accepted, under the force of man’s will, the idea that the destruction of her offspring was good; first for herself and her lord and master, and secondly for the tribe.

Should investigation uphold such an hypothesis, it would be easily understood how the frank acknowledgment represented an advanced stage, when the woman, no longer satisfied with the various trivial excuses offered for the destruction of her young, insisted on keeping them alive, and was met with, not the many invented reasons that we have seen, but the plain truth, that their continued existence endangered the food supply.

“Urgent want and sterility of the niggardly earth” were the reasons given by the natives of the island of Radnack for the law limiting the number of children.64 A second child is killed among the natives of Central Australia “only when the mother is, or thinks she is, unable to rear it”65 and yet the same authors say that “an Australian native never looks far enough ahead to consider what will be the effect on the food supply in future years, if he allows a particular child to live; what affects him is simply the question of how it will interfere with the work of his wife so far as their own camp is concerned; while, from the woman’s side, the question is, can she provide food enough for the new-born infant and the next youngest?”66

The long suckling time, that these authors and other travellers have noted, and that is here given as a reason, as opposed to the economic one, for the frequent killing of children, is due “chiefly to want of soft food and animal milk”.67

Among the members of the Areoi society, a peculiar and somewhat “secret” society68 of the islands of the Pacific, “a man with three or four children, and this was a rare occurrence, was said to be a taata taubuubuu, a man with an unwieldy or cumbrous burden; and there is reason to believe that, simply to avoid the trifling care and effort necessary to provide for their offspring during the helpless period of infancy and childhood, multitudes were consigned to an untimely grave.” A Malthusian motive has sometimes been adduced, and the natives have been heard to say, that if all the children born were allowed to live, there would not be food enough produced in the islands to support them.69

From many authorities comes direct evidence of a clash between the man and the woman in the Polynesian Islands. “As the burden of the plantation and other work devolves on the woman, she thinks that she cannot attend to more than two or three children, and the rest must be buried as soon as they are born. There are exceptions to this want of maternal affection. At times the husband urges the thing contrary to the wishes of the wife. If he thinks the infant will interfere with her work, he forcibly takes the little innocent and buries it, and she, poor woman, cries for months after her child.”70

Among the nomadic tribes it is frankly admitted that the children are a hindrance. The Lenguas, of the Paraguayan Chaco, make journeys of from ten to twenty miles, the women doing most of the hard work. The consequence is that children are not desirable. So with the Abipones, of whom Charlevoix says: “They seldom rear but one child of each sex, murdering the rest as fast as they come into the world, till the eldest are strong enough to walk alone. They think to justify this cruelty by saying that, as they are almost constantly travelling from one place to another, it is impossible for them to take care of more infants than two at a time; one to be carried by the father, and the other by the mother.”71