The Monmouth Inquirer

DEATH PENALTY
FOR CANNIBALS

France Issues Orders intended to Extirpate Practice in African Possessions.

Paris—Albert Sarraut, French minister of colonies, who was one of France's representatives at the Washington naval armament limitation and Pacific conference, has just signed two ordinances on cannibalism in the French decrees intended to extirpate the practice in the African possessions. The death penalty is imposed on any one killing or urging to kill human beings for the purpose of eating their flesh. Imprisonment of from one to ten years and fines of from 100 to 1,000 francs are to be the punishment for complicity in flesh-crimes or for eating human flesh.

Cannibalism survives, M. Sarraut says, chiefly under the form of ritual acts of sorcery.

Discussing this subject in Le Journal, M. Fernand Hauser writes:

Doctor Cureau, formerly a colonial governor, assured us some years ago, when on the primitive peoples of Equatorial Africa that cannibalism, as practiced there (and it is practiced, especially in regions rich in food resources of all sorts, vegetable and animal), is not due to privation or famine. It is solely a matter of taste,' he said. 'A predilection for a certain kind of meat.'

Cannibalism Called Instinct.

Cannibalism is then, according to Doctor Cureau, an instinct. It is a gastronomic, The man who indulges in it is necessarily ferocious. He may be a man who is gentle, gay, cheerful and friendly in his ordinary relations at least with those about him.

Doctor Cureau added that he had several times seen evidences that certain tribes make prisoners of war or buy slaves to hold them in reserve, and then kill them and eat them in accordance with their needs.

Pere Martron, who also made an exhaustive study of the African negroes, declared, on the contrary, that the cannibals did not hunt men to satisfy hunger. They eat, he said, only bodies of enemies killed in war in, more rarely, the bodies of those on whom they wish to wreak a terrible vengeance.

However that may be, Pere Martron and Doctor Cureau both stated cannibalism is dying out. Coming into intercourse with more civilized tribes, the cannibals feel a sense of shame and soon refuse to admit that human flesh is eaten by them.

Reports for Many Years,

There are reports dating back some years M. J. Brevie, chief administrator of colonies, director of political administrative affairs in the government of French West Africa, says, in 'Le Talisman contre le Naturisme au Soudan Francais'—a penetrating essay in native psychology which he has published—that many blacks still practice cannibalism, less from any real need than from an attachment to ancient rites, which, divorced from their primitive significance, appear unintelligible to us, and which they themselves can no longer explain.

'We are dealing here,' he declares, 'with human sacrifices, intended to disarm hostile spirits, or to produce a sort of physical and moral transsubstantiation from the person sacrificed to the person who eats, the latter thus assimilating the former's strength and qualities.'

But whatever may be the reasons which have kept cannibalism alive, the French government is now determined to make an end of it.