tribal affair, dependent upon tribal approval, that they easily think the clan responsible for every one’s acts.  Therefore, the due revenge may be taken upon any member of the offender’s clan or relatives.(40) It may often happen, however, that the retaliation goes further than the offence.  In trying to inflict a wound, they may kill the offender, or wound him more than they intended to do, and this becomes a cause for a new feud, so that the primitive legislators were careful in requiring the retaliation to be limited to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and blood for blood.(41)

It is remarkable, however, that with most primitive folk like feuds are infinitely rarer than might be expected; though with some of them they may attain abnormal proportions, especially with mountaineers who have been driven to the highlands by foreign invaders, such as the mountaineers of Caucasia, and especially those of Borneo—­the Dayaks.  With the Dayaks—­we were told lately—­the feuds had gone so far that a young man could neither marry nor be proclaimed of age before he had secured the head of an enemy.  This horrid practice was fully described in a modern English work.(42) It appears, however, that this affirmation was a gross exaggeration.  Moreover, Dayak “head-hunting” takes quite another aspect when we learn that the supposed “headhunter” is not actuated at all by personal passion.  He acts under what he considers as a moral obligation towards his tribe, just as the European judge who, in obedience to the same, evidently wrong, principle of “blood for blood,” hands over the condemned murderer to the hangman.  Both the Dayak and the judge would even feel remorse if sympathy moved them to spare the murderer.  That is why the Dayaks, apart from the murders they commit when actuated by their conception of justice, are depicted, by all those who know them, as a most sympathetic people.  Thus Carl Bock, the same author who has given such a terrible picture of head-hunting, writes: 

“As regards morality, I am bound to assign to the Dayaks a high place in the scale of civilization....  Robberies and theft are entirely unknown among them.  They also are very truthful....  If I did not always get the ‘whole truth,’ I always got, at least, nothing but the truth from them.  I wish I could say the same of the Malays” (pp. 209 and 210).

Bock’s testimony is fully corroborated by that of Ida Pfeiffer.  “I fully recognized,” she wrote, “that I should be pleased longer to travel among them.  I usually found them honest, good, and reserved... much more so than any other nation I know."(43) Stoltze used almost the same language when speaking of them.  The Dayaks usually have but one wife, and treat her well.  They are very sociable, and every morning the whole clan goes out for fishing, hunting, or gardening, in large parties.  Their villages consist of big huts, each of which is inhabited by a dozen families, and sometimes by several hundred persons, peacefully living together.  They show great respect for their wives, and are fond of their children; and when one of them falls ill, the women nurse him in turn.  As a rule they are very moderate in eating and drinking.  Such is the Dayak in his real daily life.