REVIEW: Sick Societies, by Robert B. Edgerton

Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert B. Edgerton (Free Press, 1992).

I just had a baby, which means I have once again been immersed in a sea of advice about how “traditional cultures” do things. And miraculously, every single kid, I discover some new practice I’ve never heard of but that apparently just everyone did until about five minutes ago. This time it was vaginal steaming. (Don’t Google, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.)

Which cultures, exactly? Oh, you know…the traditional ones, the ones whose folk wisdom is untrammeled by Western medicalization, where the pregnant woman is treated to the most nutritious foods, birth is a joyous event surrounded by supportive kin, the new mother puts her baby to the breast the minute he’s born, and she’s waited on hand-and-foot in bed for a month afterwards. So, you know, not the Ngongo of central Africa, who forbid women from eating meat, or the Netsilik Inuit or !Kung, both of whom send laboring women off to give birth in silent isolation, or any of the peoples from Fiji to northern Alberta who delay nursing for days… In fact, you might be excused if you began to suspect that the real measure of how “traditional” a culture is boils down to how much it resembles the practices of crunchy WEIRD people. You might even, if you had a nasty suspicious frame of mind, conclude that all this discussion of “traditional cultures” is just a disguised way of asserting our own preferences.

None of which is actually unique to the babies. (I’ve written about the babies before.) It’s not even unique to our era. The idea that we have been corrupted by civilization, that more primitive societies lead purer, nobler, more harmonious lives and enjoy access to truths and virtues we have lost, goes back millennia.¹ And so, naturally, does the practice of using the supposed superiority of those other cultures as clubs to beat our own. Tacitus’ Germania, for instance, is a fun read if borderline useless as a source on the actual Germanic tribes — but it’s a wonderful guide to the angst of the early Empire and the pervasive fear that greed, luxury, and ambition had replaced the nobility, valor, and honor that had once characterized the Romans. Nowadays, of course, no one writes about the barbarians’ fides and virtus; instead you’ll get paeans to their idyllic existence lived in harmony with nature, their peaceful sense of community, and probably their joyful embrace of gender and sexual diversity. But either way, most of the books about small-scale societies are actually books about us and what the people writing the books think we lack.

Huli New Guinea highlanders in ceremonial dress.

Even professional anthropologists tend to assume that small-scale (this is a polite way of saying “primitive”) societies are more satisfying, meaningful, and fulfilling than complex ones. But in their case it goes hand in hand with another, allied assumption: that these societies have developed beliefs, practices, and institutions that work well for them. After all, the thinking goes, we know that people change their tools and their behavior when their environment changes, abandoning anything that no longer serves their needs and adopting new ways of life. Therefore, anything they haven’t abandoned must be somehow adaptive. Sure, these “primal communities” might do things that seem odd to us — things like torture, infanticide, ceremonial rape, cannibalism, and so forth — but they must serve some useful function or they wouldn’t have persisted. Thus, for example, the classic ethnography of the Navajo argues that their overwhelming fear of witchcraft, which led to pervasive anxiety, a hypochondriacal obsession with magical curing rituals, and of course regular violence perpetrated against suspected witches, actually had great benefits because it allowed the Navajo direct their stress and hostility at marginal members of the community and “keep the core of the society solid.”

The problem with this framework becomes obvious as soon as you mentally translate from some strange foreigners with funny (or no) clothes to, say, a business in the industrialized world. (Which can easily be larger than the kind of small-scale society that interests anthropologists.) No one would ever say, “Well, sure, the leadership of this company allows their mediocre employees to bully their highly productive peers out of the department so they do better in the stack ranking, but the company hasn’t gone bankrupt so it must be a savvy business move. Probably the solidarity created by banding together to surreptitiously delete someone else’s code enhances productivity more than losing a 10x engineer detracts from it…” But this is exactly what anthropologists (professional and armchair) are tempted to do when they set out to understand and explain another culture. Yes, sometimes apparently bizarre behavior contains a deep and hidden wisdom, but sometimes it’s just messed up.

That’s the case the late UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton set out to make in Sick Societies: that some primitive societies are not actually happy and fulfilled, that some of their beliefs and institutions are inadequate or actively harmful to their people, and that some of them are frankly on their way to cultural suicide. The mere fact that people keep doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually working well for them, but just as the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, your society can stay dysfunctional longer than you can stay alive.

Tambaran house, New Guinea.

Anyone who’s ever watched my sister chop onions knows people don’t always do things the most efficient way. Sometimes this is fine: if you’re doing well enough to keep going, it’s not a big deal that you haven’t settled on the optimal method.² But “well enough to keep going” doesn’t actually have to be very well at all if there’s no competition, and many isolated societies do things very inefficiently indeed. The Sirionó of eastern Bolivia, for example, live entirely nude in flimsy houses amidst a cold, wet and windy forest full of stinging pests and hungry animals, without the means of making fire. Edgerton reports that they were frequently hungry, hoarded and fought about food, and simply abandoned those too sick or elderly to follow their semi-nomadic peregrinations:

Not surprisingly, people lived in terror of falling ill, but despite their fear they did not develop effective medical treatments or medications. They had few herbal medications of any kind, and these few were of dubious value. They had no remedies for snakebite or the major illnesses that afflicted them, and they had no surgical skills, not even the ability to set broken bones. What is more, some of their beliefs about health were less than helpful. Children were allowed to play with their feces, and sick persons lay unattended in hammocks that were exposed to cold and rain. They also believed that the principal sign of sickness was a person’s loss of appetite. In fact, they believed that if someone who was ill did not eat, the patient was certain to die in a few days. Terrified by this prophecy, a sick person was understandably determined to eat. Indeed, some Sirionó who became ill gorged themselves to death, a phenomenon Holmberg [the anthropologist who lived with them] witnessed on a number of occasions. He described an episode in which a man suffering from stomach pain and dysentery (ordinarily not fatal symptoms among the Sirionó) insisted on devouring huge amounts of a highly acidic fruit that was then ripe. Ignoring Holmberg’s warnings, the man managed to eat a hundred of these plum-sized fruits each night, and, not surprisingly, his painful diarrhea grew worse. The night before the man died, he consumed an entire basket full of fruit. The Sirionó were surprised by the man’s death because he had been eating so well.

Even when people are trying to take care of each other, they don’t necessarily do a good job. The Bena Bena of the New Guinea highlands are careful to keep their children away from neighboring villages they believe are inhabited by evil sorcerers, but they also leave those same children to sleep unattended beside the fire. (Unsurprisingly, many Bena Bena children lose fingers or toes to burns and some are seriously crippled.) And in east African pastoral societies like the Maasai, whose lives are centered around their cattle, children are discouraged from brushing away the flies that cluster around their eyes. Flies mean dung, and dung means wealth — but flies also carry trachoma, which if untreated leads to blindness. “The benefit to society of blind children,” Edgerton remarks drily, “is not self-evident.”

“Primal diets” aside, premodern foodways aren’t necessarily good for you, either. The Inuit regularly die of botulism from consuming raw blubber, and women and children around the world subsist on dangerously small amounts of fat and protein. Sometimes this is due to men eating first in conditions of scarcity, as among the Chukchee of Siberia (“being women, eat scraps”) or the Hudson Bay Inuit (“meat is man’s food, too good for women to have”), but just as often it’s a consequence of inefficient use of the food available. New Guinea highlanders, who consider their pigs a source of wealth and prestige as much as food, will rarely eat pork outside of occasional enormous feasts — and almost never during famines.³ And sometimes it gets worse, as among the Maring of highland Papua New Guinea:

Many of the Maring—essentially vegetarians who rarely ate animal food—were severly protein-deprived, and in general these people were smaller and more susceptible to disease than other Maring who lived in areas where protein was more plentiful. Like many other undernourished people in marginal environments, the Maring suffered population decline from disease, and at least one of their customs exacerbated their plight. As might be expected, young adults who were able to work hard to produce food were relatively well-nourished, but the very young, old, and ill were severely undernourished, and many died. This was a tragic situation but one that Maring society could survive, at least over the short run.

However, Maring culture further required that the widowed spouse and close relatives of a deceased person mourn by reducing their food intake for an extended period and, moreover, that they not enter their gardens to produce or harvest food for several weeks after the death occurred. As more and more nutritionally marginal people died, increasing numbers of previously healthy adults were compelled to deny themselves food while mourning, and they too soon suffered from malnutrition and the consequent risk of infection. And as more people died, the Maring, who were already anxious about their dwindling population, began to accuse one another of causing these deaths by sorcery. In this anxious atmosphere, even close relatives stopped helping one another, young men left the area in search of wage work, and potential brides from areas where food was more abundant refused to marry Maring men. All of these apparently disruptive consequences may not have resulted solely from Maring mourning practices, but it is difficult to believe that a practice which endangered or drove away so many of the reproductive-age members of the society was adaptive.

New Guinea highlanders in modern dress.

Some kinds of maladaptive behavior make people sick. Others simply make them unhappy. The Inuit are a case in point:

Yet as ingenious as Inuit groups were in solving some of their technological problems, they maintained some markedly maladaptive beliefs. There can be no doubt that Inuit technology exemplified rational, even ingenious, “applied science”: houses of wood and ice blocks that kept them warm in arctic winters, clothing that was both waterproof and warm, efficient bird and animal traps, snow goggles that anticipated modern designs, sleds, kayaks, and complex harpoons, to mention only a few of their most obvious achievements. But at the same time, they imbued their environment with an appallingly large assemblage of aggressively evil entities: mermaids that enticed and then killed people, giant birds able to carry off and kill caribou and people alike, giant lake fish able to swallow a man with a single bite, and all manner of invisible ghosts and spirits capable of causing illness or death.

These fearsome entities forced the Inuit to employ elaborate means of protection that were a poor use of their time and energy. The presumed existence of these entities also created such anxiety that the Inuit chose to alter their hunting and fishing strategies in order to avoid them. For example, they avoided lakes that they admitted offered superior fishing and hunting because they were thought to be inhabited by monstrous man-eating fish, and they avoided excellent campsites in order to avoid malevolent ghosts and spirits. Good hunting and fishing areas could not be visited at night for fear of “wild babies”—creatures resembling human infants—that were thought to devour people like wolves or, more remarkable still, tickle them to death. Neither needlessly living in fear of culturally created supernatural entities nor limiting subsistence activities because of them is a rational adaptive strategy, as the early European visitors proved when they hunted and fished with great success in areas the Inuit feared to enter.

But it’s not only the relationship with the outside world that can become profoundly dysfunctional. Among the Pokot of Kenya, where brutal wifebeating was the norm, men often reported they only trusted food prepared by their mothers or sisters; their wives might poison them. Others said their wives were trying to kill them by witchcraft. Several women agreed that yes, they certainly were, and one woman told the ethnographers she had succeeded. You might think, too, of the “mountain people” of turn-of-the-century Appalachia. But none of them have anything on the Gusii of western Kenya:

A large, horticultural population near Lake Victoria, the Gusii lived in clans that were territorially separated from other clan territories by areas of uninhabited bush. Because these clans were exogamous, men had to seek wives from neighboring clans. Many societies have chosen marriage partners in the same way without social conflict, but Gusii clans were so hostile to one another that most had feuded in the past, and animosities continued to run high. A Gusii proverb said, “Those whom we marry are those whom we fight.” This presented the Gusii with a dilema, but instead of attempting to soothe these tensions as other societies with a similar form of marriage have done, the Gusii made matters worse.

According to Robert LeVine, although the Gusii attempted to prevent open hostilities between the groom’s relatives and the relatives of the bride from an alien clan, they nevertheless inflamed an already tense situation in many ways. When the groom first visited the bride’s home before the wedding ceremony, he was accosted by a crowd of highly vocal women who colorfully criticized his appearance and taunted him by declaring that his penis was too small, adding that he would be impotent on the wedding night in any event. When the bride visited the groom’s relatives, she found the door to her future mother-in-law’s house barred by a crowd of hostile women who, not to be outdone, screamed insults at her, mocked and pinched her, and sometimes even smeared dung on her lips before allowing her inside.

Receptions like these could not be expected to herald a tranquil and loving marriage, and neither could the events of the wedding night. Starting matters off on the worst possible foot, the bride refused to disrobe or go to bed, and then she did everything in her considerable power (including tying her pubic hair over her vagina) to prevent her husband from achieving penetration. This behavior was traditional; girls were taught to resist their husbands in such ways, including a practice called ogotega in which the vaginal muscles were kept so tense that penetration was said to be impossible. It was also said that a “fierce” bride might prevent her husband from successfully achieving sexual intercourse for as long as a week, but more commonly, young male friends of the groom (who waited outside the nuptial house) intervened and helped the groom by holding the bride’s legs apart, a practice that no doubt did nothing to lessen her hostility. Once intercourse finally took place, the husband was obligated to repeat it as often as possible that night (six times was the minimally respectable number) and in the process to cause his bride as much pain as possible.

Interclan hostility contributed to this extraordinary antagonism, but Gusii culture was pervaded by sexual hostility even among members of the same clan. For example, in a custom known as ogosonia, when adolescent boys were recuperating from the effects of being circumcised, adolescent girls from the same clan came to the hut where the boys were secluded. Maliciously, they disrobed, danced provocatively, challenged them to have intercourse, and made disparaging comments about their genitals. The girls were triumphant if their actions resulted in erections that caused the boys intense pain when their partly healed incisions burst open.

Both before and after marriage, Gusii men were said to have been so frustrated sexually that they resorted to rape. Whether sexual frustration was the cause or not, the fact is that the Gusii committed rape almost four times as often as the average rate in the United States. In 1937, there were so many rapes that the British colonial government had to threaten military action, and in 1950 there were so many convictions for rape that there were not enough prison facilities to hold the offenders. Not surprisingly, married life itself was always distant and often hostile. The antagonism between Gusii men and women clearly caused considerable stress, and if it served any useful social purpose, it has yet to be identified.

In many cases, though, small-scale societies were delighted to abandon practices that ethnographers had convinced themselves were central to their culture. The Dugum Dani of western Papua New Guinea were so notoriously warlike that when an Australian police post was introduced to the area, anthropologist Karl Heider predicted that it would do little to stem the Dani’s endemic violence. In fact, though, they quickly abandoned their warfare as soon as the presence of the colonial authorities gave them a plausible coordinating mechanism, and many later expressed relief that they were free of the cycle of violence and retribution. Similarly, highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop. Edgerton goes on:

And Fitzjohn Porter Poole reports this about the Bimin-Kuskusmin [another highlander group] practice of cannibalism: “Many Bimin-Kuskusmin men and women whom I interviewed and who admitted to socially proper cannibalistic practices acknowledged considerable ambivalence, horror, and disgust at their own acts. Many persons noted that they had been unable to engage in the act, had not completed it, had vomited or even fainted, or had hidden the prescribed morsel and had lied about consuming it.” What is more, Poole observed that on the eleven occasions that he actually witnessed cannibalism among the Bimin-Kuskusmin, they exhibited “extreme reticence and ambivalence” about the act.

On the one hand, this sounds truly awful. On the other hand, I challenge you not to giggle at the image of a New Guinea highlander pushing a bit of Great-Aunt Agnes around his plate until he can wrap it in his napkin and surreptitiously stuff it down the heating vent or feed it to the dog.

Gusii women.

The most impressively maladaptive stories in Sick Societies all end “and then the colonial authorities showed up and made them cut out that nonsense,” probably because when that didn’t happen they all died instead. For example, both the Kaingáng of Brazil and the Kaiadilt of Australia’s Bentinck Island were teetering on the brink of total extinction from vicious cycles of raids and retaliatory counter-raids (the Kaiadilt lost more than 60% of their population in five years of fighting!) when local administrators interrupted them. But theirs aren’t even the most dramatic examples of societies whose own practices were killing them; that prize belongs to the Marind-anim, who lived on the coast of southwest New Guinea:

…despite the fact that the Marind-anim were known as ferocious headhunters who raided enemies as far away as 100 miles, their population was dwindling. Indeed, their own recognition of population loss was apparently what drove the Marind-anim to carry out their raids because in addition to taking the heads of the men whom they killed, they captured small children whom they took home to be raised as Marind-anim. Marind-anim were not able to maintain their numbers because their women, it seems, were largely infertile. It was first thought that their infertility was a result of newly introduced venereal disease, but research demonstrated that many infertile women had never contracted venereal disease and, indeed that their inability to bear children began well before venereal disease was introduced to them. Van Baal, the principal source on this society, believes that the women’s infertility was the result of an unusual sexual practice.

Marind-anim men, like men in many other societies in that part of Melanesia, practiced ritual male homosexuality, based on their belief that semen was essential to human growth and development. They also married quite young, and to assure the bride’s fertility, she too had to be filled with semen. On her wedding night, therefore, as many as ten members of the husband’s lineage had sexual intercourse with the bride, and if there were more men than this in the lineage, they had intercourse with her during the following night. That this intercourse was not merely a symbolic act is indicated by the fact that when the night ended, the bride was so sore that she could not walk. Nevertheless, a similar ritual was repeated at various intervals throughout a woman’s life. Instead of enhancing a woman’s fertility as intended, this practice apparently led to severe pelvic inflammatory disease that produced infertility.

Timely intervention from the Dutch colonial authorities put an end to this peculiar practice. One can only wonder how much of the world is littered with the bones of people who had no one to stop them in time.

Marind-anim in ceremonial dress, 1920s.

Of course, plenty of small-scale societies are actually quite well-adapted and work pretty well for their populations, a fact that Edgerton is happy to acknowledge. Towards the end of the book he has a fascinating digression on this score concerning the Plains Indians, whom I tended to think of as being basically identical: the Comanche have a lot more in common with the Lakota than with, say, the Navajo, even though the Navajo were much closer. But before the reintroduction of the horse to North America, these tribes were a number of culturally distinct groups — horticulturalists from the eastern woodlands, foragers from elsewhere — who were only able to move onto the Plains to hunt buffalo when escaped Spanish horses made their way north. When that happened, though, an identifiable Plains culture developed with remarkable speed: the shared ecological constraints meant all these tribes all converged on a set of cultural technologies (equestrian practices, the social role of warriors, seasonal dissolution to small bands, etc.) that better suited their new home.⁴ However, in other walks of life, various tribes kept many of the practices that had been important to them before the move, but rarely adopted those of other groups. This second set of institutions clearly weren’t particularly adaptive (the Comanche got along just fine without the Sun Dance), but they weren’t a problem either. There’s an absolutely enormous range of human cultural diversity and it’s not all (or even mostly) messed up. All the same, though, you can’t assume that just because adaptive behavior persists, anything that’s persisted must therefore be adaptive. Sometimes it’s just not maladaptive enough to have died out…yet.

G.K. Chesterton famously likened social institutions to a fence across a road, which we shouldn’t tear down until we know why it was erected in the first place. (Maybe it’s to confine a raging bull! You don’t want to be gored by a raging bull, do you?) Now, ol’ Gilbert Keith was a smart guy, so he’s a little more nuanced about it than most people who toss out “Chesterton’s Fence!” in an argument would have you believe — he goes on to say that if a would-be reformer “knows how [an institution] arose and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served” — but he’s still a trifle too sanguine about how intentionally people create culture. Sure, maybe there’s a raging bull. Maybe there was one but it died. Maybe people thought there was a bull but there really wasn’t. Or maybe a truck full of fence panels got into a crash, some of the material was left behind, and then someone came along and said, “Oh! It looks like this fell down, I’d better rebuild it because it must’ve been here for a reason — Chesterton’s Fence, after all.”

This may sound like an exaggeration, but that really is how a lot of these maladaptive practices work. Yes, sometimes are people behaving rationally based on wildly incorrect understandings of the world, but sometimes they do really weird stuff and when you ask them why they just shrug and say, “We’ve always done it that way.” So why doesn’t Chesterton address that possibility? Well, he was writing in defense of tradition, but he was doing it from the apex of a culture that had been reaching toward the Good for the better part of three thousand years. The really bad old fences had long since been torn down (along, alas, with some of the good ones); in his day, the wicked things were novelties in a world that was changing too fast for culture to keep up in any kind of humanly satisfying way. Chesterton had the luxury of using utilitarian and epistemological arguments to defend good things, because for him they were traditional — but that’s an accident of history, not a hard-and-fast rule.

There’s a certain kind of person who likes to talk about Chesterton’s Fence, and who will tell you that you should obey tradition because, being the distillation of centuries of human experience, it encodes tacit knowledge and gives you truths you couldn’t possibly reach on your own. This person, whom we may call the utilitrad, is rarely from a society that burns its widows.⁵

The utilitrad isn’t quite wrong, epistemologically: tradition is the means by which good things become accessible to us, and the traditional way of doing things probably is more effective than whatever you can come up with on your lonesome. But like any purely directional ideology (yes, I’m looking at you, “conservatism means being opposed to change”), it has actual no content. It’s a frame pretending to be a picture, and you can only get away with it if you’ve carefully arranged it in front of something nice. The moment the backdrop changes, you’re hosed. Because yes, it’s much faster to point at good things and say “look, the wisdom of the ages!” and leave it at that, but if you’re not willing to defend them as being actually good you’ll have no defense against bad things that have managed to persist. (And Sick Societies is surely proof that bad things can persist virtually indefinitely.) A pure adherence to tradition would lead us to endorse the Carthaginians’ sacrifice of their infants — after all, it had the stamp of antiquity!⁶

No, if you’re trying to figure out what’s actually good, you can’t just rely on heuristics like “has it been this way for a long time” — and certainly not “do primitive societies do it.” I regret to inform you that you actually have to do the hard work of making actual moral judgements. And to do that you need a robust anthropology — not in the sense of living for several years with people who wear bones in their noses, but a theory of what a human being is and what one is for.

It does help to learn about the people with bones in their noses, though, because it’s much easier to notice when they’re doing something strange than when we are. The Bena Bena, who protect their children from sorcerers but let them get burned, might have a laughably inaccurate threat model — but what about American parents who go to great lengths to avoid pesticide exposure or stranger abductions and give their children unsupervised access to the Internet? It’s easy to boggle at the Marind-anim, who were literally dying out because of their reproductive practices, but have you looked at WEIRD fertility rates lately? Well, at least we don’t do horrible things to teenagers’ genitals! Oh…wait…

Cultural anthropology is a useful tool in the pursuit of a philosophical anthropology: it illuminates the terrain, shows us the possibility space, and helps us to see what a tiny corner of it we inhabit. And it reminds us that however bad we may fear things are, they can always be worse.

1. At least in the Occident. My informant tells me that the Noble Savage is a less common trope in, say, China. Maybe the Blue savages are just less noble.

2. In case you’re wondering, this is the optimal method for chopping onions.

3. A disproportionate number of Edgerton’s examples come from the Arctic and the New Guinea highlands, not necessarily because the people who live there are unusually dysfunctional but because they’re among the few places small-scale societies stuck around long enough for more complex societies to decide writing about them seemed interesting.

Incidentally, do you remember Yali, the New Guinean man whose innocent question about why Europeans ended up colonizing Oceania instead of vice versa frames Guns, Germs, and Steel? I Googled him, since I wondered whether maybe part of the specific answer had to do with a maladaptive highlander culture, and discovered that far from being a random curious acquaintance he was a politician and cargo cult leader who was obsessed with discovering the secret magic behind European colonialism. His Wikipedia page is a trip. I feel like this might have been useful information for Diamond to include.

4. This is the two-page spread that made me want a comparative ethnography of horse peoples. How do the cultures of Pontic Steppe compare to those of the Great Plains? I still haven’t quite found it, but I am on the track of something that may scratch the itch if my inter-library loan ever comes through…

5. This isn’t quite germane but Edgerton retells this amazing story I needed to share with you:

In 1829 a British magistrate named Halliday attempted to convince a widow not to become a sati. “At length she showed some impatience and asked to be allowed to proceed to the site.” Horrified, Halliday tried once again to dissuade her by asking if she understood how much pain she was about to suffer. The woman looked scornfully at the Englishman, then demanded that a lamp be brought to her and lighted. “Then steadfastly looking at me with an air of grave defiance she rested her right elbow on the ground and put her finger in the flame of the lamp. The finger scorched, blistered, and blackened and finally twisted up … this lasted for some time, during which she never moved her hand, uttered a sound or altered the expression of her countenance.” Halliday gave permission for the ceremony to proceed.

6. Chesterton, proving if necessary that he was not a utilitrad, firmly and correctly condemned it as monstrous wickedness. Carthago delenda est!