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HINTS TO TRAVELLERS. 
to punish crime, and the local religion may no more concern itself 
directly with men’s behaviour to one another than it did in the South 
Sea Islands. But among the roughest people there is family affection, 
and some degree of mutual help and trust, without which, indeed, it is 
obvious that society would break up, perhaps in general slaughter. Con¬ 
sidering the importance of this primitive morality in the history of man¬ 
kind, it is unfortunate that the attention of travellers has been so little 
drawn to it, that our information is most meagre as to how far family 
affection among rude tribes may be taken to be instinctive, like that of 
the lower animals, or how far morality is produced by public opinion 
favouring such conduct as is for the public good, but blaming acts which 
do harm to the tribe. It is desirable to inquire what conduct is sanctioned 
by custom among any people, whether, for instance, infanticide is thought 
right or wrong, what freedom of behaviour is approved in youths and 
girls, and so on. For though breaches of custom may not be actually 
punishable, experience will soon convince any explorer among any rude 
tribe that custom acts in regulating their life even more strictly than 
among ourselves. The notion of even savages leading a free and un¬ 
restrained life is contradicted by those who know them best; in fact, they 
are bound in every act by ancestral custom. While each tribe thus has 
its moral standard of right and wrong, this differs much in different tribes, 
and one must become intimately acquainted with any people to ascertain 
what are really their ruling principles of life. Accounts have been often 
given of the natural virtue and happiness of rude tribes, as in the forests 
of Guiana or the hills of Bengal,-where the simple native life is marked 
by truthfulness, honesty, cheerfulness, and kindness, which contrast in 
a striking way with the habits of low-class Europeans. There are few 
phenomena in the world more instructive than morality thus existing in 
practical independence either of law or religion. It may still be possible to 
observe it for a few years before it is altered by contact with civilisation, 
which, whether it raises or lowers on the whole the native level, must 
supersede in great measure this simple family morality. 
The unit of social life is the family, and the family is based on a 
marriage-law. Travellers who have not looked carefully into the social 
rules of tribes they were describing, or whose experience has been of 
tribes in a state of decay, have sometimes reported that marriage hardly 
existed. But this state of things is not confirmed as descriptive of any 
