Eskimo life is based upon communism.  What is obtained by hunting and fishing belongs to the clan.  But in several tribes, especially in the West, under the influence of the Danes, private property penetrates into their institutions.  However, they have an original means for obviating the inconveniences arising from a personal accumulation of wealth which would soon destroy their tribal unity.  When a man has grown rich, he convokes the folk of his clan to a great festival, and, after much eating, distributes among them all his fortune.  On the Yukon river, Dall saw an Aleonte family distributing in this way ten guns, ten full fur dresses, 200 strings of beads, numerous blankets, ten wolf furs, 200 beavers, and 500 zibelines.  After that they took off their festival dresses, gave them away, and, putting on old ragged furs, addressed a few words to their kinsfolk, saying that though they are now poorer than any one of them, they have won their friendship.(29) Like distributions of wealth appear to be a regular habit with the Eskimos, and to take place at a certain season, after an exhibition of all that has been obtained during the year.(30) In my opinion these distributions reveal a very old institution, contemporaneous with the first apparition of personal wealth; they must have been a means for re-establishing equality among the members of the clan, after it had been disturbed by the enrichment of the few.  The periodical redistribution of land and the periodical abandonment of all debts which took place in historical times with so many different races (Semites, Aryans, etc.), must have been a survival of that old custom.  And the habit of either burying with the dead, or destroying upon his grave, all that belonged to him personally—­ a habit which we find among all primitive races—­must have had the same origin.  In fact, while everything that belongs personally to the dead is burnt or broken upon his grave, nothing is destroyed of what belonged to him in common with the tribe, such as boats, or the communal implements of fishing.  The destruction bears upon personal property alone.  At a later epoch this habit becomes a religious ceremony.  It receives a mystical interpretation, and is imposed by religion, when public opinion alone proves incapable of enforcing its general observance.  And, finally, it is substituted by either burning simple models of the dead man’s property (as in China), or by simply carrying his property to the grave and taking it back to his house after the burial ceremony is over—­a habit which still prevails with the Europeans as regards swords, crosses, and other marks of public distinction.(31)

The high standard of the tribal morality of the Eskimos has often been mentioned in general literature.  Nevertheless the following remarks upon the manners of the Aleoutes—­nearly akin to the Eskimos—­will better illustrate savage morality as a whole.  They were written, after a ten years’ stay among the Aleoutes, by a most remarkable man—­the Russian missionary, Veniaminoff.  I sum them up, mostly in his own words:—­