om our habit of
assuming that, because his inhibitions and unfreedom do not correspond
with our own restraints, they do not exist. Sir John Lubbock pointed
out long ago that the savage is hedged about by conventions so minute
and so mandatory that he is actually the least free person in the
world. But, in spite of this, Spencer and others have insisted that
he is incapable of self-restraint, is carried away like a child by
the impulse of the moment, and is incapable of rejecting an immediate
gratification for a greater future one. Cases like the one mentioned
by Darwin of the Fuegian who struck and killed his little son when
the latter dropped a basket of fish into the water are cited without
regard to the fact that cases of sudden domestic violence and quick
repentance are common in any city today; and the failure of the
Australian blacks to throw back the small fry when seining is referred
to without pausing to consider that our practice of exterminating
game and denuding our forests shows an amazing lack of individual
self-restraint.

The truth is that the restraints exercised in a group depend largely
on the traditions, views, and teachings of the group, and, if we have
this in mind, the savage cannot be called deficient on the side of
inhibition. It is doubtful if modern society affords anything more
striking in the way of inhibition than is found in connection with
taboo, fetish, totemism, and ceremonial among the lower races. In the
great majority of the American Indian and Australian tribes a man
is strictly forbidden to kill or eat the animals whose name his clan
bears as a totem. The central Australian may not, in addition, eat
the flesh of any animal killed or even touched by persons standing
in certain relations of kinship to him. At certain times also he is
forbidden to eat the flesh of a number of animals and at all times he
must share all food secured with the tribal elders and some others.

A native of Queensland will put his mark on an unripe zamia fruit, and
may be sure that it will be untouched and that when it is ripe he has
only to go and get it. The Eskimos, though starving, will not molest
the sacred seal basking before their huts. Similarly in social
intercourse the inhibitions are numerous. To some of his sisters,
blood and tribal, the Australian may not speak at all; to others only
at certain distances, according to the degree of kinship. The west
African fetish acts as a police, and property