father. The young man came, whereupon his elder
brother had him seized, strangled, and buried within a few yards of the
house where the missionaries were living. Afterwards the fratricide came
and mourned over his murdered brother by sitting on the grave with his
elbows on his knees and covering his face with his hands. In this
posture he remained for a long time in silence, and then departed very
thoughtful. His motive for thus mourning over the brother whom he had
done to death is not mentioned by the missionaries and was probably not
known to them. We may conjecture that it was not so much remorse for his
crime as fear of his brother's ghost, who otherwise might have haunted
him.[86] Morality, or at all events a semblance of it, has often been
thus reinforced by superstitious terrors.

[86] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern
Pacific Ocean_, pp. 238-240.

In recording this incident the missionaries make use of an expression
which seems to set the strangling of human beings for the recovery of
sick relations in a somewhat different light. They say that "the prince
of darkness has impressed the idea on them, that the strength of the
person strangled will be transferred into the sick, and recover
him."[87] On this theory the sacrifice acts, so to say, mechanically
without the intervention of a deity; the life of the victim is
transfused into the body of the patient as a sort of tonic which
strengthens and revives him. Such a rite is therefore magical rather
than religious; it depends for its efficacy on natural causes, and not
on the pity and help of the gods. Yet the missionaries, who record this
explanation of the custom, elsewhere implicitly accept the religious
interpretation of such rites as vicarious sacrifices; for they say that
among the superstitious notions of the natives concerning spirits was
one that "by strangling some relations of the chief when he is sick, the
deity will be appeased, and he (that is, the sick chief) will
recover."[88] Perhaps both explanations, the religious and the magical,
were assigned by the Tongans: consistency of thought is as little
characteristic of savage as of civilised man: provided he attains his
ends, he recks little of the road by which he reaches them. An English
sailor named Ambler, who had resided for thirteen months in Tonga before
the arrival of the missionaries, told them, "that when a great chief lay
sick they often strangled their wome