man he had killed would work his death by magic. For three nights after he had clubbed a human being to death the Fijian warrior had to sleep sitting up. In Central Australia the rest of a successful Arunta warrior is very broken. For nights he must lie awake listening to the cry of the little bird his fallen foe incarnates. Any failure to hear the cry would result in paralysis of right arm and shoulder. For a long time after his kill, a Monumbo warrior of New Guinea may touch no one. Were he to touch his wife or children, they would break out with sores. Among the Koita the homicide himself is endangered. He is supposed to grow thin and emaciated. Having been splashed with the blood of his victim, as the corpse rots, the slayer, they believe, wastes away.
The taboos growing out of this New Guinea belief as well as the other taboos on the victorious have been explained by the ethnologist as due to ghost fear. The homicide is subject to haunting by his victim, the simple-minded hold, and so the homicide must be exorcised or purified. However this may be, whatever reasons early man may have given himself, the beliefs and practises I have cited and many others analogous indicate, it seems to me, that very early man felt that the killing of other human beings was excessively repugnant;[1] with death in any form he was reluctant to be implicated. Very likely the upset the implication through killing caused him induced in him a special kind of ghost fear. Among the primitive, fear of ghosts or of evil spirits generally accompanies emotional disturbance.
That the killing itself had to be provoked by fear, by great fear, also seems probable, and that aversion to it had to be overcome by co-operation, by the courage inspired by numbers, by gregarious assurances, by social mysticism.[2] Holding then that "human nature" is not murderous, i. e., men do not kill for the fun of killing, I suggest that war has been possible not because, according to the common view, men are naturally warlike, individually bellicose, but because they are naturally fearful and, above all, in their gregariousness highly mystical. Collective fears and uncritical gregarious impulses are thus the data the pacifist propagandist must consider. Expressions of combativeness or aggressiveness are not so much his concern[3] as are expressions of cowardice and of mysticism.
- ↑ Just as to-day feels the more conservative of the two sexes, and the sex more addicted to death taboos, i. e., to mourning.
- ↑ Sometimes by specific acts of magic. "When old enough to join the fighting men the Zulu lads were beaten with the leaves of the cocoa-nut palm during a dance and 'medicine' was given to cause them not to care for or have pity upon any one." (Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Islands of Torres Straits, V., 299. Cambridge, 1904.)
- ↑ At a recent meeting to organize a "League to Enforce Peace" ex-President Taft said: "So long as nations partake of the frailties of men who compose them, war is a possibility. . . ." And the speaker had here in mind, not individual fearfulness, I think, but individual bellicosity.
