"You didn't recognise the rights of property of the fellow who
killed the pheasant, though," Bertram interposed, laughing, and
imperturbably good-humoured. "But that's always the way with these
taboos, everywhere. They subsist just because the vast majority
even of those who are obviously wronged and injured by them really
believe in them. They think they're guaranteed by some divine
prescription. The fetich guards them. In Polynesia, I recollect,
some chiefs could taboo almost anything they liked, even a girl or
a woman, or fruit and fish and animals and houses: and after the
chief had once said, 'It is taboo,' everybody else was afraid to
touch them. Of course, the fact that a chief or a landowner has
bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or
has inherited it from his fathers, doesn't give him any better
moral claim to it. The question is, 'Is the claim in itself right
and reasonable?' For a wrong is only all the more a wrong for
having been long and persistently exercised. The Central Africans
say, 'This is my slave; I bought her and paid for her; I've a
right, if I like, to kill her and eat her.' The king of Ibo, on the
West Coast, had a hereditary right to offer up as a human sacrifice
the first man he met every time he quitted his palace; and he was
quite surprised audacious freethinkers should call the morality of
his right in question. If you English were all in a body to see
through this queer land-taboo, now, which drives your poor off the
soil, and prevents you all from even walking at liberty over the
surface of the waste in your own country, you could easily--"

"Oh, Lord, what shall we do!" Philip interposed in a voice of
abject terror. "If here isn't Sir Lionel!"