creches for getting rid of the children, every one of them recoils before the necessity of performing the cruel sentence; they prefer to expose the baby in the wood rather than to take its life by violence.  Ignorance, not cruelty, maintains infanticide; and, instead of moralizing the savages with sermons, the missionaries would do better to follow the example of Veniaminoff, who, every year till his old age, crossed the sea of Okhotsk in a miserable boat, or travelled on dogs among his Tchuktchis, supplying them with bread and fishing implements.  He thus had really stopped infanticide.

The same is true as regards what superficial observers describe as parricide.  We just now saw that the habit of abandoning old people is not so widely spread as some writers have maintained it to be.  It has been extremely exaggerated, but it is occasionally met with among nearly all savages; and in such cases it has the same origin as the exposure of children.  When a “savage” feels that he is a burden to his tribe; when every morning his share of food is taken from the mouths of the children—­and the little ones are not so stoical as their fathers:  they cry when they are hungry; when every day he has to be carried across the stony beach, or the virgin forest, on the shoulders of younger people there are no invalid carriages, nor destitutes to wheel them in savage lands—­he begins to repeat what the old Russian peasants say until now-a-day.  “Tchujoi vek zayedayu, Pora na pokoi!” ("I live other people’s life:  it is time to retire!”) And he retires.  He does what the soldier does in a similar case.  When the salvation of his detachment depends upon its further advance, and he can move no more, and knows that he must die if left behind, the soldier implores his best friend to render him the last service before leaving the encampment.  And the friend, with shivering hands, discharges his gun into the dying body.  So the savages do.  The old man asks himself to die; he himself insists upon this last duty towards the community, and obtains the consent of the tribe; he digs out his grave; he invites his kinsfolk to the last parting meal.  His father has done so, it is now his turn; and he parts with his kinsfolk with marks of affection.  The savage so much considers death as part of his duties towards his community, that he not only refuses to be rescued (as Moffat has told), but when a woman who had to be immolated on her husband’s grave was rescued by missionaries, and was taken to an island, she escaped in the night, crossed a broad sea-arm, swimming and rejoined her tribe, to die on the grave.(37) It has become with them a matter of religion.  But the savages, as a rule, are so reluctant to take any one’s life otherwise than in fight, that none of them will take upon himself to shed human blood, and they resort to all kinds of stratagems, which have been so falsely interpreted.  In most cases, they abandon the old man in the wood, after having given him more than