All over the world, as we have seen (p. 161), the young receive a very severe training in preparation for their entry into the full privileges and duties of the tribe. They are then instructed in the traditional rules of conduct, the proper abstinences, the right behaviour of the sexes. Such ceremonies are recognised as of great importance in communities of the simplest form without political control, for it is through them that the social ties of tribal kinship gain coherence and strength. Various observers have testified to the consideration displayed in Australia, for instance, towards the aged, the sick, and the infirm. The blind are often carefully tended, and the best fed. "As a matter of fact," says Mr. Marett, "the earlier and more democratic types of primitive society, uncontaminated by our civilisation, do not present many features to which the modern conscience can take exception; but display rather the edifying spectacle of religious {203} brotherhoods encouraging themselves by mystical communion to common effort." In West Africa Miss Kingsley noted the close connection in negro communities between religion and life. To get through day or night a man must be right in the religious point of view; he must be on working terms with the great world of spirits round him. In spite of much make-believe the secret societies in which the men are enlisted under solemn oaths, are recognised as important moral agencies. The Ukuku, recently described by Dr. Nassau, could settle tribal quarrels, and proclaim or enforce peace, when no individual chief or king could end the strife. Such organisations regulate marriage laws, the duties of parents and children, the privileges of eldership, the recognition of age and worth. The entry into them lies through the rites of religion. "I have studied these societies," wrote Miss Kingsley; "I am in possession of fairly complete knowledge of three of them. I know men acquainted with ten other societies, and their information is practically the same as my own, viz. that those rites consist in a series of oath-takings as you pass from grade to grade ... Each grade gives him a certain amount of instruction in the native law. Each grade gives him a certain function in carrying out the law. And finally, when he has passed through all the grades, which few men do, when he has sworn the greatest oath {204} of all, when he knows all the society's heart's secret, that secret is 'I am I,' the one Word. The teaching of that Word is law, order, justice, morality. Why the one Word teaches it, the man does not know. But he knows two things: one that there is a law-god, and the other that, so says the wisdom of our ancestors, his will must be worked or evil will come. So in his generation he works to keep the young people straight."