ABSTRACT
The pathos of the thing, vvhen you have grasped the underlying idea, is so deep that the strangeness of it passes away, and you almost forget to hate the horrors of the slaughter that hang round Oil River funeral customs, or, at any rate, you understand the tenacity you meet with here of the right to carry out killing at funerals, a greater tenacity than confronted us in Gold Coast or Dahomey regions, because a different idea is involved in the affair. On the Gold Coast, for example, you can substitute wealth for the actual human victim, because with wealth the dead soul could, after all, make itself comfortable in Srahmandazi, but not so in the Rivers. Without slaves, wives, and funds, how can the dead soul you care for speak with the weight of testimony of men as to its resting place or position? Rolls of velvet or satin, and piles of manillas or doubloons alone cannot speak; besides, they may have been stolen stuff, and the soul you care for may be put down by the authorities as a mere thieving slave, a sort of mere American gold bug trying to pass himself off as a duke -or a descendant ofGeneral Washington-which would lead to that soul being disgraced and sent back in a vile form. Think how you yourself, jf in comfortable circumstances, belonging to a family possessing wealth and po\ver, would like father, mother, sister, or brother of yours who by this change of death had just left these things, to go down through death, and come back into life in a squalid slum!
