608 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from one woman but from many, and in it there is surely nothing 

 to discourage Mr. Allen and those who think with him. The 

 women to whom he appeals are ready to meet him, but it must be 

 on a platform of their own choosing, and they can afford to wait. 

 They do not ask " aid in rebelling against maternity," but they 

 demand that the responsibilities of fatherhood shall no longer be 

 shifted or made light of. In short, they require of the fathers of 

 the next generation just what Mr. Allen demands for the mothers, 

 viz., " that they shall be as strong, as wise, as pure, as sane, as 

 healthy, as earnest, and as efficient as they can be made." 



And as this demand, on the part at least of the men who make 

 it, is presumably based not so much on any personal predilection 

 for the qualities enumerated as upon their desire to further the 

 best interests of the race, the argument in its favor is as valid for 

 the one sex as for the other. 



--- 



ABSOLUTE POLITICAL ETHICS. 



By HERBERT SPENCER. 



LIFE in Fiji at the time when Thomas Williams settled there 

 must have been something worse than uncomfortable. One 

 of the people who passed near the string of nine hundred stones 

 with which Ra Undreundre recorded the number of human vic- 

 tims he had devoured, must have had unpleasant waking thoughts 

 and occasionally horrible dreams. A man who had lost some 

 fingers for breaches of ceremony, or had seen his neighbor killed 

 by a chief for behavior not sufficiently respectful, and who re- 

 membered how King Tanoa cut off his cousin's arm, cooked it 

 and ate it in his presence, and then had him cut to pieces, must 

 not unfrequently have had "a, bad quarter of an hour." Nor 

 could creeping sensations have failed to run through any women 

 who heard Tui Thakan eulogizing his dead son for cruelty, and 

 saying that " he could kill his own wives if they offended him, 

 and eat them afterward." Happiness could not have been general 

 in a society where there was a liability to be one among the ten 

 whose life-blood baptized the decks of a new canoe a society in 

 which the killing even of unoffending persons was no crime but a 

 glory ; and in which every one knew that his neighbor's restless 

 ambition was to be an acknowledged murderer. Still there must 

 have been some moderation in murdering even in Fiji. Or must 

 we hesitate to conclude that unlimited murder would have caused 

 extinction of the society ? 



The extent to which each man's possessions among the Biluchis 

 are endangered by the predatory instincts of his neighbors, may 



