Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/55

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WAR
19

confirm peace.[1] These usages are institutional. They are positive rules of an arbitrary character, depending upon agreement and usage, but are devised to satisfy expediency. In Queensland no fighting at all is allowed at night in camp; those who want to fight must go outside, and after a fight the victor must show to his comrades that he had a real grievance. If he does not convince them of this they force him to submit to the same mutilation from his victim that he has inflicted. The women fight with their yam-sticks, which are about four feet long. One woman allows the other to strike her on the head; the second must then submit to a blow; thus they go on until one does not want any more.[2] What we have to notice here is that the fight, inside the group, is under regulations, which fact makes it institutional. The duel is a similar case of a conventionalized fight in the midst of a peaceful civil order. In all these cases we see that war is admitted inside of a peace-group when individuals are wronged or offended by comrades, but only in conventionalized and regulated form, so that it is a kind of lawful war.

We also find war between groups under some regulation and conventionalization when there is a bond of kinship or religion uniting the two groups. It appears that this is the origin of the rules of war by which its horrors are reduced. On the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides the eight thousand inhabitants are divided into two groups, one at each end of the island, and each group is subdivided into villages. If two villages in the same division fight, as they often do, the fighting is not intense

  1. Mathews, R. H.: Message-sticks used by the Aborigines of Australia, in Am. Anth., X, 290; Smyth, R. B.: Aborigines of Victoria I, 165, 181; Curr, Australian Race, I, 92.
  2. Roth, W. R.: Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, 141.