CHAPTER XXII
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Westermarck, Edward
Among many savages the old people, in particular, have a claim to support and assistance, not only from their own children or relatives, but from the younger members of the community generally.
Among the Australian natives the old men get the best and largest share of everything, and are allowed to monopolise the youngest and best-looking women, whilst a young man must consider himself fortunate if he can get an old woman for wife.142 Among the Tonga Islanders “every aged man and woman enjoys the attentions and services of the younger branches of society.”143 In the Kingsmill Islands “generosity, hospitality, and attention to the aged and infirm are virtues highly esteemed and generally practised among all the natives.”144 Among the Kafirs, when persons advanced in years become sick and helpless, “everyone is eager to afford them assistance.”145 In the opinion of the Aleuts, “feeble old men must be respected and attended when they need aid, and the young and strong should give them a share of their booty and help them through all their troubles, endeavouring to obtain in exchange their good advice only.”146
The sick, also, are often very carefully attended to.
Among the coast tribes of British Columbia Mr. Duncan “always found one or two nurses to an invalid, if the case was at all bad; the sympathy of the nurses, too, seemed very great.”147 Beechey says of the wild Indians of Upper California:—“The very great care taken of all those who are affected with any disease ought not to be allowed to escape a remark. When any of their relations are indisposed, the greatest attention is paid to their wants.”148 Keating noticed the kind and humane treatment which the Potawatomis extended even to the idiots.149 The Koriaks “carefully attend those who are sick.”150 The same is said of the Ainos of Japan,151 and the Tagbanuas of the Philippine Islands.152 In Sarawak no relative is abandoned because an injury or illness may have incapacitated him for work.153 When a Dyak is ill at home, the women nurse the patient in turn.154 In Samoa “the treatment of the sick was invariably humane.”155 In Tana,156 Humphrey’s Island,157 Erromanga,158 and Tasmania,159 they were likewise kindly attended to; and the same is the case at least among many of the Australian tribes.160 Concerning the aborigines of Herbert River, in Northern Queensland, Lumholtz writes:—“The natives are very kind and sympathetic towards those who are ill, and they carry them from camp to camp.
This is the only noble trait I discovered in the Australian natives.”161 In various parts of Australia the blind, and especially the aged blind, are carefully tended; travellers on the northern coast of the continent have noticed that these are generally the fattest of the company, being supplied with the best of everything.162 “No trait in the character of the Malagasy,” says Ellis, “is more creditable to their humanity, and more gratifying to our benevolent feelings, than the kind, patient, and affectionate manner in which they attend upon the sick.”163 A similar praise is bestowed upon the Mandingoes164 and Kafirs.165 Among the Zulus, says Mr. J. Tyler, “work, however important, is at once suspended that they may help their afflicted friends.”166
Whilst the information which I have been able to gather on the social customs of uncivilised races seems to indicate that, in the majority of cases, mutual kindness and goodwill prevail within their communities, there are not wanting statements of a different character. But these statements are, after all, exceptional, and some of them are either ambiguous or obviously inexact. Only too often travellers represent to us the savage, not as he is in his daily life amidst his own people, but as he behaves towards his enemy, or towards a stranger who enters his country uninvited. As an experienced observer remarks, “the savage, passionate and furious with the feeling of revenge, slaughtering and devouring his enemy and drinking his blood, is no longer the same being as when cultivating his fields in peace; and it would be as unjust to estimate his general character by his actions in these moments of unrestrained passion, as to judge of Europeans by the excesses of an excited soldiery or an infuriated mob.”167 Moreover, many accounts of savages date from a period when they have already been affected by contact with a “higher culture,” as we call it, a culture which almost universally has proved to exercise a deteriorating influence on the character of the lower races.
Among the North American Indians, for instance, “there was more good-will, hospitality, and charity, practised towards one another” before white people came and resided among them;168 whereas contact with civilisation has made them “false, suspicious, avaricious and hard-hearted.”169 As has been truly said, “search modern history, and in the North and South and East and West the story is ever the same—we come, we civilise, and we corrupt or exterminate.”170
Among the semi-civilised and civilised nations charity has universally been regarded as a duty, and has often been strenuously enjoined by their religions. When Spain and Peru first came into contact, the Americans surpassed the Spaniards in brotherly love and systematic care for the needy. They had a poor-law according to which the blind, lame, aged, and infirm, who could not till their own lands so as to clothe and feed themselves, should receive sustenance from the public stores.171 The ancient Mexicans, according to Clavigero, seemed to give without reluctance what had cost them the utmost labour to acquire.172 “The great virtue of the Coreans is their innate respect for and daily practice of the laws of human brotherhood. Mutual assistance and generous hospitality among themselves are distinctive national traits.”173 According to Chinese law, “all poor destitute widowers and widows, the fatherless and childless, the helpless and the infirm, shall receive sufficient maintenance and protection from the magistrates of their native city or district, whenever they have neither relations nor connections upon whom they can depend for support.”174 “Benevolence,” said Confucius, “is more to man than either water or fire.”175 To assist the needy, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to succour the sick, to save men in danger—these and similar acts of kindness are, according to Chinese beliefs, merits which will be rewarded by the unseen powers that watch human conduct, whereas the uncharitable and parsimonious are threatened with divine punishments.176 In a book of
Buddhistic-Confucian flavour, as familiar to the youth of Japan as the Sermon on the Mount is to us, it is said, “Above all things, men must practise charity; it is by almsgiving that wisdom is fed.”177 According to the Dhammapada, “the uncharitable do not go to the world of the gods; fools only do not praise liberality; a wise man rejoices in liberality, and through it becomes blessed in the other world.”178 Indeed, in the didactic poetry of Buddhism the virtue of beneficence occupies the most prominent place; without any regard to what is the measure of the real benefit thereby extended to the recipient of the gift, the legends set before us as a duty the most unbounded generosity, pushed even to the extreme of self-destruction.179 And in its conception of charity and liberality, as in all other points of worldly morality, Buddhism does not differ from the standard recognised in India since ancient times.180 Already in the Vedic hymns praise is bestowed on those who from their abundance willingly dispense to the needy, on those who do not turn away from the hungry, on those who are kind to the poor.181 In the Hitopadesa it is said that the good man shows pity even to the worthless, as the moon does not withdraw its light even from a member of the lowest caste.182 The sacred law-books of India are full of prescriptions enjoining almsgiving as a duty on all twice-born men.183 “A householder must give as much food as he is able to spare to those who do not cook for themselves, and to all beings one must distribute food without detriment to one’s own interest.”184 The
Source notes
140 Drury, Adventures during Fifteen Years’ Captivity on the Island of Madagascar, p. 172 sq.
141 Ellis, History of Madagascar, i. 139. For other African instances, see Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa, p. 17 (Mandingoes); Burton, Abeokuta, i. 303 (Yoruba); Idem, Two Trips to Gorilla Land, i. 106 (Mpongwe); Monrad, Guinea-Kysten og dens Indbyggere, p. 7; Johnston, River Congo, p. 423 (races of the Upper Congo); Wilson and Felkin, op. cit. i. 225 (Waganda).
142 Eyre, op. cit. ii. 385 sq. Mathew, in Jour. & Proceed. Roy. Soc. N.S. Wales, xxiii. 407. Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, p. 163. Cf. Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, ii. 248; Brough Smyth, op. cit. i. 138; Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 51.
143 Mariner, op. cit. ii. 155.
144 Hale, U.S. Exploring Expedition. Vol. VI. Ethnography and Philology, p. 95.
145 Lichtenstein, op. cit. i. 265.
146 Veniaminof, quoted by Petroff, loc. cit. p. 155.
147 Duncan, quoted by Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia, p. 292 sq.
148 Beechey, op. cit. ii. 402.
149 Keating, Expedition to the Source of St. Peter’s River, i. 100.
150 Krasheninnikoff, op. cit. p. 233.
151 von Siebold, Die Aino auf der Insel Yesso, p. 11.
152 Worcester, Philippine Islands, p. 494.
153 St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, ii. 323.
154 Bock, Head-Hunters of Borneo, p. 211.
155 Turner, Samoa, p. 141. Cf. Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, p. 146.
156 Turner, Samoa, p. 323.
157Ibid. p. 276.
158 Robertson, Erromanga, p. 399.
159 Ling Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania, p. 47. Bonwick, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, p. 10.
160 Brough Smyth, op. cit. ii. 284 (West Australian natives). Schuermann, ‘Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln,’ in Woods, Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 225.
161 Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, p. 183.
162 Ridley, Kámilarói, p. 169. Eyre, op. cit. ii. 382 Barrington, History of New South Wales, p. 23. Stirling, op. cit. p. 36.
163 Ellis, History of Madagascar, i. 231 sq.
164 Caillié, op. cit. i. 354.
165 Lichtenstein, op. cit. i. 266.
166 Tyler, Forty Years among the Zulus, p. 195.
167 Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, ii. 130 sq.
168 Warren, in Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, ii. 139.
169 Domenech, Seven Years’ Residence in the Great Deserts of North America, ii. 69.
170 Boyle, op. cit. p. 108.