not only as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible if the reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe.”  This explains the murders in question but does not show them to be excusable; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishness and hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infants than restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the children they could provide for.

In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as much semblance of an excuse as the Arabs.  Turner relates (284) that in the New Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposed that they could not attend to more than two or three, all the others were buried alive; in other words the babes were murdered to save trouble and allow the men to live in indolence.  In the instances from India referred to above, various trivial excuses for female infanticide were offered:  that it would save the expenses connected with the marriage rites; that it was cheaper to buy girls than to bring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes; that male births are increased by the destruction of female infants; and that it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them to grow up and become causes of strife afterward.  Among the Fijians, says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide “no admixture of anything like religious feeling or fear, but merely whim, expediency, anger, or indolence.”  Sometimes the general idea of woman’s inferiority to man underlies the act.  They will say to the pleading missionary:  “Why should she live?  Will she wield a club?  Will she poise a spear?”

But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide reached their climax of frivolity.  There mothers killed their children because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; or because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to suffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because they liked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no other reason than because they could not make them stop crying.  So they buried them alive though they might be months or even years old (Ellis, P.R., IV., 240).

These revelations show that it is not “hardness of life” but “hardness of heart”—­sensual, selfish indulgence—­that smothers the parental instinct.  To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be a great injustice to brutes.  No species of animals, however low in the scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring.  In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a rule, far superior to savages and barbarians.  I emphasize this point because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings.  But there is no inconsistency in this.  We shall see later on that there are other things in which animals are superior not only to savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.