est motive is _the desire to please women_! No
Dyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed a
man, and in times when the chances for murder were few and far
between, suitors have been compelled to wait a year or two before they
could bag a skull and lead home their blushing bride. The weird
details of this mode of courtship will be given in the chapter on
Island Love on the Pacific.

SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.

In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the
sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at
this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the
victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer
to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of
slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine
myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a
mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the
earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger
than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful
instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter
of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.

In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up
only a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--the
others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction
than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai
tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. "The
aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving
an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp" (Fison and
Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted
to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so
inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called
upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the
words of Professor Robertson Smith (281):

"Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the
women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization,
still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a
promise not to commit child-murder."

Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their
custom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90)
relates that with the Kandhs this cu