Notes on the Customs of Mota, Banks Islands. 141 



32. Morality. 



To judge of a people's notion of morality is very difficult 

 without an intimate acquaintance with them ; and this is 

 one of the many matters on which writers with a theory to 

 maintain can make customs and language mean almost what 

 they please. As to life and property, no doubt murder and 

 theft were not considered at Mota as they are in a civilised 

 community ; but a violent man and a quiet man, a thief and 

 an honest man, were looked upon as very different characters ; 

 and there are no lack of words for various kinds of badness 

 which convey disapprobation. So also words are in common 

 use for a liberal, a compassionate, an industrious man, which 

 certainly are used as terms of approbation. How far this 

 use of words — this approbation or disapprobation — was 

 moral, depends upon what people choose to call morality. 

 Morality can be denied to any people if words may be 

 treated as they are by Mariner. 



[Sir John Lubbock accuses savages of being "almost entirely wanting in 

 moral feeling;" but this accusation seems to me to be entirely unjust. The 

 question here is not as to the comparative excellence of two moral codes, but 

 as to whether savages have any moral code at all; and no one who knows 

 anything about them will assert that they have none. Not only have they a 

 well-defined code of their own, but they are far more strict in observing it than 

 civilised men are in observing theirs. There is no such thing as a lawless 

 class among savages ; nor is th?re any such thing among them as a man's 

 being held in honourable esteem though he deliberately and habitually offends 

 against the code of morality by which he professes to be bound. That social 

 hypocrisy is the exclusive property of civilised nations. 



Mariner's treatment of words, referred to by Mr. Codring-ton, furnishes us 

 with a good example of that liability to mistake which besets men who 

 have only an imperfect acquaintance with a people whenever they begin to 

 reason on what little they know. Mariner, or rather the savant who com- 

 piled the work which goes under Mariner's name, says of the Tongan lan- 

 guage that " there are no words in it essentially expressive of some of the 

 higher qualities of human merit — as virtue, justice, humanity ; nor of the con- 

 trary, as vice, injustice, cruelty ;" and this statement is gravely quoted by Sir 

 John Lubbock in support of his assertion that " savages are almost entirely 

 wanting in moral feeling." The fact of the case is that all those words are 

 abstract nouns, and few such nouns are found in any language spoken by 

 savage tribes. But I could quote plenty of adjectives from the Tongan lan- 

 guage which express the quality of any particular action in terms of appro- 

 bation or disapprobation, as the case may be — good or bad, just or unjust, 

 cruel or merciful, and so forth. The moral code of the savage is indeed a low 

 one as compared with that for the possession of which we have not ourselves 

 to thank; but it is the best he knows, and he acts up to it.— L. F.] 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



[The ground covered by the Melanesian Mission— from the Three Hills, 

 Anaiteum, to Ysabel, in the Solomon Group, together with other islands 

 beyond their line, presents one of the most promising and least known fields 

 of research to the anthropologist, especially with regard to the social consti- 

 tution of the people. We find among them unmistakable traces, such as 

 are found almost everywhere else, of an ancient commune, broken up by that 



