About 1820, during the time of scarcity consequent on Tshaka’s wars, certain of the Natal tribes (the natives say, at the suggestion of a chief named Umdava) adopted the practice of cannibalism. It was abandoned when food again became plentiful, and has always been regarded with great horror; those individuals who had acquired such a taste for human flesh as to prefer it to other food, fled into the recesses of the Drakensberg and Maluti mountains. Moshesh, the great Basuto chief, directed his efforts for years to the extirpation of the practice, though unwilling to do so, as his advisers desired, by means of a summary massacre of the offenders. The _Amazimu_ (_Modimo_) are now a myth to both Zulus and Basutos; indeed the word, as now used, is frequently synonymous with “ogre.” It is to be noted that Moshesh was not in any way acting under European influence, in fact the last of the cannibals had disappeared long before the country came under British rule, and though the memory of their atrocities was still fresh when the French missionaries arrived in 1833, the chief had already been proceeding against them for some time. See Casalis, _Les Bassoutos_. ----- ----- Footnote 181: Staniland Wake, _Evolution of Morality_, vol. i. pp. 427 _et seq._ To be consulted for facts of this kind. ----- It would be easy to continue this historical demonstration, but the above is sufficient to justify the term discoverers. From causes of which we are ignorant, but analogous to those which produce great poets or painters, there arise men of indisputable moral superiority who _feel_ what others do not feel, just as a great poet does compared with ordinary men. And for one who has succeeded, how many have failed for want of a favourable environment! A St. Vincent de Paul among the Kanakas would be as impossible as a Mozart among the Fuegians. In primitive societies there has been a long struggle between the strongest egoistic tendencies, with their dissolvent action, and the weaker and intermittent altruistic tendencies, which have progressed through the agency of some more enlightened individuals, and also with the help of force, of which we still have to speak. II. Let us now examine the development of the moral sentiment under its negative and restrictive aspect—_i.e._, as the sense of justice. Here the intellectual element evidently preponderates, and its evolution involves the other. “Justice,” says Littré, “has the same foundation as science.” One rests on the principle of identity which governs the region of speculation, the other rests on the principle of equivalence and rules the sphere of action. Justice, in its origin, is a compensation for damages. Its evolution starts from an instinctive semi-conscious manifestation, rising by progressive steps to a universalist conception. Let us mark the principal stages.