um_,) and
which, in the case before us, will always be an _ex parte_ argument, all
will agree that no objection can be taken to making repasts on _porcus
longus_ once fairly killed,--for instance, on heroes stretched on the
battle-field. This was the cogent argument of the New Zealander, after
baptism,--used in discussing the topic with the Rev. Mr. Yale. Willing
to give up slaughtering fellow-men for the sake of eating them, he could
not see why it was not wicked to waste so much good food.

If it were objected, that, admitting the making of your enemy's
flesh flesh of your own flesh would necessarily lead to skirmishes,
"surprise-parties," and battles for the sole purpose of getting a
dinner,--to a sort of pre-prandial exercise, as in fishing,--we would
simply answer, "Too late!" Our friends who desire the reopening of the
African slave-trade declare that they wish to buy slaves only. When
statesmen, and missionaries, and simple people with simple sense and
simple hearts, cry out to them, "Stop! for the sake of our common
Father, stop! By reopening the slave-trade, you revive the vilest
crimes, and, for every negro ultimately sold to you on the coast, you
cause the murder of at least ten in the interior, not to speak of those
that are coolly massacred in the barracoon, when no demand exists,"--the
satisfactory reply is: "We have nothing to do with all that; we do not
travel beyond the record. We buy the negro who is a slave; what made him
a slave we do not care to know. The pearl in the market does not show
the toil of the fisher." And so the Fijian would properly reply: "Do not
mix up different subjects. I rescue my departed brother from ignominious
decay, and remake a man of him. How he came to depart,--that belongs to
quite a different chapter."

This utilitarian view acquires a still greater importance when applied
to criminals under sentence of capital punishment. Soon after Beccaria,
it was asked, if we mistake not, by Voltaire: "Of what use is the
dead body of a criminal? You cannot restore the victim to life by the
execution of the murderer." And many pardons in America have been
granted on the assumption that no satisfactory answer could be given to
the philosophical question: "What use can the swinging body of the poor
creature be to any one?" The Fijian alone has a perfectly satisfactory
reply.

The missionaries, already named in this paper, give a long account of
the execution of a supposed Fijian consp