618 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
details of the British Empire. The first point to realise on such a survey is 
that the mere extent of such an Empire makes the subject of its administration 
an immensely important one for the British people. 
The next point for consideration and realisation is that an empire situated 
in so many widely separated parts of the world must contain within its 
boundaries groups of every variety of mankind, in such numerical strength as 
to render it necessary to control them as individual entities. They do not 
consist of small bodies lost in a general population, and therefore negligible from 
the administrator’s point of view, but of whole races and tribes or of large 
detachments thereof. 
These tribes of mankind profess every variety of religion known. There are 
Christians, Jews, Mahommedans, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Animists, and to 
use a very modern expression, Animatists, adherents of main religions followed 
by an immense variety of sects, governed, however loosely, by every species of 
philosophy that is or has been in fashion among groups of mankind, and current 
in every stage of development, from the simplest and most primitive to the 
most historical and complex. One has to bear in mind that we have within our 
borders the Andamanese, the Papuan, and the Polynesian, as well as the highly 
civilised Hindu and Chinese, and that not one of these, nor indeed of many other 
peoples, has any tradition of philosophy or religion in common with our own; 
their very instincts of faith and belief following other lines than ours, the 
prejudices with which their minds are saturated being altogether alien to those 
with which we ourselves are deeply imbued. 
The subjects of the British King-Emperor speak between them most of the 
languages of the world, and certainly every structural variety of human speech 
has its example somewhere in the British Empire. A number of these languages 
is still only in the process of becoming understood by our officials and other 
residents among their speakers, and let there be no mistake as to the magnitude 
of the question involved in the point of language alone in British Imperial 
regions. A man may be what is called a linguist. He may have a working 
knowledge of the main European languages and of the great Oriental tongues, 
Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, which will carry him very far indeed among 
the people—in a sense, in fact, from London to Calcutta—and then, without 
leaving that compact portion of the British Possessions known as the Indian 
Empire, with all its immense variety of often incompatible subordinate 
languages and dialects, he has only to step across the border into Burma and 
the Further East to find himself in a totally different atmosphere of speech, 
where not one of the sounds, not one of the forms, not one of the methods, with 
which he has become familiarised is of any service to him whatever. The same 
observation will again be forced on him if he transfers himself thence to 
Southern Africa or to the Pacific Ocean. Let him wander amongst the North 
American Indians, and he will find the linguistic climate once more altogether 
. changed. 
Greater Britain may be said to exhibit all the many varieties of internal 
social relations that have been set up by tribes and groups of mankind—all the 
different forms of family and general social organisation, of reckoning kinship, 
of inheritance and control of the possession of property, of dealing with the 
birth of children and their education and training, physical, mental, moral, and 
professional, in many eases by methods entirely foreign to British ideas and 
habits. For instance, infanticide as a custom has many different sources of 
origin. 
Da fellow subjects of the King follow, somewhere or other, all the different 
notions and habits that have been formed by mankind as to the relations 
between the sexes, both permanent and temporary, as to marriage and to what 
have been aptly termed supplementary unions. And finally, their methods of 
dealing with death and bringing it about, of disposing of the dead and 
worshipping them, give expression to ideas, which it requires study for an 
inhabitant of Great Britain to appreciate or understand. I may quote here as 
an example, that of all the forms of human head-hunting and other ceremonial 
murder that have come within my cognisance, either as an administrator or 
investigator, not one has originated in callousness or cruelty of character. Indeed, 
from the point of view of the perpetrators, they are invariably resorted to for 
