same way; since it fails to furnish any method by which to determine whether such and such acts _would_ or _would not_ be conducive to happiness—leaves all such questions to be decided empirically. {217} ABSOLUTE POLITICAL ETHICS. [_Originally published in_ The Nineteenth Century _for January 1890. The writing of this essay was consequent on a controversy carried on in_ The Times _between Nov. 7 and Nov. 27, 1889, and was made needful by the misapprehensions and misrepresentations embodied in that controversy. Hence the allusions which the essay contains. The last few paragraphs of it in its original form were mainly personal in their character; and, not wishing to perpetuate personalities, I have omitted them_.] Life in Fiji, at the time when Thomas Williams settled there, must have been something worse than uncomfortable. One of the people who passed near the string of nine hundred stones with which Ra Undreundre recorded the number of human victims he had devoured, must have had unpleasant waking thoughts and occasionally horrible dreams. A man who had lost some fingers for breaches of ceremony, or had seen his neighbour killed by a chief for behaviour not sufficiently respectful, and who remembered how King Tanoa cut off his cousin’s arm, cooked it and ate it in his presence, and then had him hacked to pieces, must not unfrequently have had “a bad quarter of an hour.” Nor could creeping sensations have failed to run through women who heard Tui Thakau eulogizing his dead son for cruelty, and saying that “he could kill his own wives if they offended him, and eat them afterwards.” Happiness {218} could not have been general in a society where there was a liability to be one among the ten whose life-blood baptized the decks of a new canoe—a society in which the killing even of unoffending persons was no crime but a glory; and in which everyone knew that his neighbour’s restless ambition was to be an acknowledged murderer. Still, there must have been some moderation in murdering even in Fiji. Or must we hesitate to conclude that unlimited murder would have caused extinction of the society?