Des relations qui existent chez les peuples d’espèce malaie du grand Océan, entre la classe aristocr

CHAP. 21: > Of the relations that exist among the peoples of the Malay species of the great Ocean, between the aristocratic class and the other classes of the population. — Of the morals that result from these relations.

The relations that take place between the members of the aristocracy and their inferiors are as harsh as their social state might lead one to suppose. The great men, armed with sticks or clubs, accompany with blows any order that is not immediately executed. Sometimes they club to death on the spot the individual they are striking, if he belongs to the inferior class [584]. If they wish to clear a crowd, they disperse it with great blows of stones, or by violently brandishing their clubs. If the multitude is on a ship, it has no other means of escaping the blows than to throw itself into the sea [585]. Sometimes, however, the great men abstain from treating with harshness or insolence the men of the lowest ranks who cannot enter into comparison with them; but this is only to make their superiority felt in a harsher manner to those who, having been born like them in the privileged ranks, are nevertheless a little less elevated. The aristocratic spirit shows itself with regard to the latter with all the violence natural to men whom education has not taught to dissimulate their feelings [586]. The general chief conducts himself, with regard to his subordinates, as they do with regard to their inferiors: if, placed in his large canoe, he encounters on his route boats that cannot avoid him, because respect obliges the men who guide them to lie down in his presence, he passes over them and swamps them, without even paying attention that they are in his path [587]. The great men, in the case where they judge an individual who is their subject to be guilty, do not disdain to perform the office of executioner [588].

The properties of individuals who do not belong to the privileged orders are no more respected than their persons. We have seen that, to take a family's house from it, it is sufficient for the general chief to set foot in it, and that to forbid the population the use of such or such foods, it is sufficient to declare them taboo. If an individual of the inferior ranks possesses an object that suits a chief, the latter commands him to give it to him; and, if he is not obeyed, he strikes him with his club, until the resistance ceases [589]. The king's sons take the things that suit them wherever they find them; the king himself, if he meets men coming from fishing, takes their fish from them without any necessity. When he sounds a conch shell that produces a very brilliant sound, all his subjects are obliged to bring him edibles of all kinds. The persons of the inferior ranks possess, in a word, only what it pleases the chiefs to leave them [590].

A people that has founded its existence on the lands and on the labor of a conquered population recognizes as belonging to others only what it does not have the strength or the skill to seize. Force and cunning are for it the only measures of the just and the unjust; from the moment it can treat free men like those it possesses, it makes no difference between the one and the other, because in effect all difference disappears. However, however vigilant masters may be, they cannot prevent the subjugated population from diverting to its profit a part of the goods that are taken from it, or from seeking to make itself free, unless they establish among it a certain kind of duties. This is, in effect, the course that the Malay peoples of the great Ocean have taken: they have established that nothing is sacred except what is taboo,** that is to say, what religion has forbidden to touch; and as the priests belong to their caste and are masters of the religion, nothing is taboo but their persons and their properties. It results from this that the great men are bound by nothing toward persons who have less power than they, while the subjugated population is, on the contrary, subjected to numerous duties toward them.

The individuals who belong to the privileged classes, the great possessors of lands, the military men, and the priests, having established that nothing is wrong except what is taboo,** that is to say, what they themselves have prohibited, the theft that tends to enrich them is neither criminal, nor even shameful. It is not surprising, therefore, if the navigators who have frequented these islands have considered the inhabitants, almost without exception, as the most adroit and most impudent thieves [591]; the thefts have almost always been committed at the instigation and for the profit of the great men. The inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands who had taken nothing from Cook's ships, as long as the chiefs had been absent, committed several thefts as soon as the latter arrived.

“We attributed this change of conduct,” says the editor of the voyage, “to the presence and encouragement of the chiefs; for, in general, we found in the hands of the great personages of the island the things that had been stolen from us, and we had many reasons to believe that the larcenies had been committed at their instigation.” [592]

The thefts committed in the Friendly Islands from French ships were also done for the profit of the chiefs, even when it was men of the lowest ranks who were guilty of them [593].