which now usually ignore them altogether.
HOW SENTIMENTS CHANGE AND GROW

In conversation with friends I have found that the current belief that
love must have been always and everywhere the same, because it is such
a strong and elemental passion, is most easily shaken in this _a
priori_ position by pointing out that there are other strong feelings
in our minds which were lacking among earlier and lower races. The
love of grand, wild scenery, for instance--what we call romantic
scenery--is as modern as the romantic love of men and women. Ruskin
tells us that in his youth he derived a pleasure from such scenery
"comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a
noble and kind mistress."


NO LOVE OF ROMANTIC SCENERY

Savages, on the other hand, are prevented from appreciating snow
mountains, avalanches, roaring torrents, ocean storms, deep glens,
jungles, and solitudes, not only by their lack of refinement, but by
their fears of wild animals, human enemies, and evil spirits. "In the
Australian bush," writes Tylor (_P.C._, II., 203), "demons whistle in
the branches, and stooping with outstretched arms sneak among the
trunks to seize the wayfarer;" and Powers (88) writes in regard to
California Indians that they listen to night noises with unspeakable
horror:

"It is difficult for us to conceive of the speechless
terrors which these poor wretches suffer from the screeching
of owls, the shrieking of night-hawks, the rustling of the
trees ... all of which are only channels of poison wherewith
the demons would smite them."

To the primitive mind, the world over, a high mountain is the horror
of horrors, the abode of evil spirits, and an attempt to climb it
certain death. So strong is this superstition that explorers have
often experienced the greatest difficulty in getting natives to serve
as porters of provisions in their ascents of peaks.[6] Even the Greeks
and Romans cared for landscape only in so far as it was humanized
(parks and gardens) and habitable. "Their souls," says Rohde (511),

"could never have been touched by the sublime thrills we
feel in the presence of the dark surges of the sea, the
gloom of a primeval forest, the solitude and silence of
sunlit mountain summits."

And Humboldt, who first noted the absence in Greek and Roman writings
of the admiration of romantic scenery, remarked (24):

"Of the eternal snow of the Alps, glowing in the rosy
light of the morning or evening sun, of the loveliness
of the blue glacier ice, of the stupendous grandeur of
Swiss landscape, no description has come down to us
from them; yet there was a constant procession over
these Alps, from Helvetia to Gallia, of statesmen and
generals with literary men in their train. All these
travellers tell us only of the steep and abominable
roads; the romantic aspect of scenery never engages
their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar,
when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his
time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical
treatise 'De Analogia.'"

A sceptical reader might retort that the love of romantic scenery is
so subtle a sentiment, and so far from being universal even now, that
it would be rash to argue from its absence among savages, Greeks, and
Romans, that love, a sentiment so much stronger and more prevalent,
could have been in the same predicament. Let us therefore take another
sentiment, the religious, the vast power and wide prevalence of which
no one will deny.


NO LOVE IN EARLY RELIGION

To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful,
infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To
accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now,
without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what
conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. The
moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names--"The
Rioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or
beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The
Murderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous,
revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They are
demoralized heathen--monster expressions of moral corruption"
(Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat each other just
as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of the
dead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, _P.R_., I., 275). It
might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery,
revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his
gods cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quite
true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in
sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge,
murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, are
altogether too coarse and callous to be able to experience the higher
religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful
observer (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 291) says:

"Instead of exercising those affections of gratitude,
complacency, and love toward the objects of their
worship which the living God supremely requires, they
regarded their deities with horrific dread, and
worshipped only with enslaving fear."

This "enslaving fear" is the principal ingredient of primitive
religious emotion everywhere. To the savage and barbarian, religion is
not a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of the
equatorial Africans (103) that "their whole lives are saddened by the
fears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superstitions
under which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in,
receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposed
to do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent gods must be propitiated
by sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahu
because his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan,
the wicked Legba, has hundreds of statues before which offerings are
made. "Early religions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, "are
selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so
much as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the gods fail to
respond to the offerings made to them, the sacrificers naturally feel
aggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person who
knows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In Japan,
China, and Corea, if the gods fail to do what is expected of them,
their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rains
fail, thousands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought still
continues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. During
a thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the following
extraordinary scene:

"A great number of women, employed in reaping the
extensive corn-fields through which we passed were
raising their hoes and voices to heaven, and, yelling
furiously, cursed 'Morimo' (God), as the terrific
thunder-claps succeeded each vivid flash of lightning.
On inquiry I was informed by 'Old Booy' that they were
indignant at the interruption of their labors, and that
they therefore cursed and menaced the cause. Such
blasphemy was awful, even among heathens, and I fully
expected to see the wrath of God fall upon them."

If any pious reader of such details--which might he multiplied a
thousand-fold--still believes that religious emotion (like love!) is
the same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings during
worship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway those
who participate in a religious ceremony like that described in the
following passage taken from Rowney's _Wild Tribes of India_ (105). It
refers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the God of War, the
victims of which, both male and female, are often bought young and
brought up for this special purpose:

"For a month prior to the sacrifice there was much
feasting and intoxication, with dancing round the
Meriah, or victim ... and on the day before the rite he
was stupefied with toddy and bound at the bottom of a
post. The assembled multitude then danced around the
post to music, singing hymns of invocation to some such
effect as follows: 'O God, we offer a sacrifice to you!
Give us good crops in return, good seasons, and
health.' On the next day the victim was again
intoxicated, and anointed with oil, which was wiped
from his body by those present, and put on their heads
as a blessing. The victim was then carried, in
procession round the village, preceded by music, and on
returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the
village deity ... the blood from the carcass being
allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The
victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown
into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died
from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening
noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The
priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and
buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the
rest of the people going through the same form after
him."

Still more horrible details of these sacrifices are supplied by Dalton
(288):

"Major Macpherson notes that the Meriah in some
districts is put to death slowly by fire, the great
object being to draw from the victim as many tears as
possible, in the belief that the cruel Tari will
proportionately increase the supply of rain."

"Colonel Campbell thus describes the _modus operandi_ in
Chinna Kimedy: 'The miserable Meriah is dragged along the
fields, surrounded by a crowd of half-intoxicated Kandhs,
who, shouting and screaming, rush upon him, and with their
knives cut the flesh piece-meal from his bones, avoiding the
head and bowels, till the living skeleton, dying from loss
of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are
burnt and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it
from insects.'"

In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild
tribes of India. Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterly
abhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but a
well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbé Dubois,
declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements of
Hindoo religious life:

"Whatever their religion sets before them, tends to
encourage these vices; and, consequently, all their senses,
passions, and interests are leagued in its favor" (II., 113,
etc.).

Their religious festivals "are nothing but sports; and on no occasion
of life are modesty and decorum more carefully excluded than during
the celebration of their religious mysteries."

More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings of
their deities. The _Bhagavata_ is a book which deals with the
adventures of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 205):

"It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the
place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to
take advantage of their unguarded exposure. Then he
rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes,
and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of
gesture. He maintained sixteen wives, who had the title
of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines.... In
obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with
the _Bhagavata_. It is, nevertheless, the delight of
the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands
of their children, when learning to read."

Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a
dozen or more young Bayadères are kept for the purpose of increasing
the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and
theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt,
and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of
obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are
shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased
with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Robertson
Smith says that "in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prostitution was
practised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the license
allowed to herself by the unmarried mother goddess." Nor were the
early Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals were
sensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those of
the Hindoos. Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the
legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in its
original form unutterably obscene.

Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout
feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all
these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship--the
eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well
as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient gods. The
progress--like the Evolution of Romantic Love--has been from the
sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highest
religious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration that
of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still very
far from that lofty ideal.

"The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor
his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turns out an unlucky
number he will take the little leaden image of the saint
from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in
the mud."

"The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because
it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for their crops"
(Brinton, _R.S_., 126, 82). These are extreme cases, but Italian
lazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goers
whose worship is inspired not by love of God but by the expectation of
securing a personal benefit. All those who pray for worldly
prosperity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happy
hereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of the
deity, and even their gratitude for favors received is too apt to be
"a lively sense of possible favors to come." Still, there are now not
a few devotees who love God for his own sake; and who pray not for
luxuries but that their souls may be fortified in virtue and their
sympathies widened. But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme any
longer, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, that
religious emotion is very complex and variable, that in its early
stages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, or
even respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious;
that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove)
passed through coarse, carnal, degrading, selfish, utilitarian stages
before it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic,
and devotional attitude of our time.

Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its
gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is
that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined
agnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just as
there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never
will know the emotions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seem
so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as
they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though
they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans? I offer this
consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of
overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory.

The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change with
our ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to suppose that a man whose
ideas in regard to the nature of his gods do not prevent him from
flogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same as
those of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, says
to his revered Creator: "Thy will be done on earth as it is done in
heaven," and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in the
religious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it so
unlikely that the sexual passion, too, should "suffer a sea change
into something rich and strange?"

The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion that
love is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact that
the comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has been
strangely neglected. Anthropology, the Klondike of the comparative
psychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than the
absence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civilized nations
who had not yet discovered the nobler super-sensual fascinations which
women are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in that
science show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into its
present exalted form. I will illustrate this assertion with reference
to one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pages
regarding virtues relating to the sexual sphere and directly connected
with the subject of this book.


MURDER AS A VIRTUE

The committing of wilful murder is looked on with unutterable horror
in modern civilized communities, yet it took eons of time and the
co-operation of many religious, social, and moral agencies before the
idea of the sanctity of human life became what it is now when it might
be taken for an instinct inherent in human nature itself. How far it
is from being such an instinct we shall see by looking at the facts.
Among the lowest races and even some of the higher barbarians, murder,
far from being regarded as a crime, is honored as a virtue and a
source of glory.

An American Indian's chief pride and claim to tribal honor lies in the
number of scalps he has torn from the heads of men he has killed. Of
the Fijian, Williams says (97):

"Shedding of blood is to him no crime, but a glory. Whoever
may be the victim--whether noble or vulgar, old or young,
man, woman, or child--whether slain in war or butchered by
treachery, to be somehow an acknowledged murderer, is the
object of a Fijian's restless ambition."

The Australian feels the same irresistible impulse to kill every
stranger he comes across as many of our comparatively civilized
gentlemen feel toward every bird or wild animal they see. Lumholtz,
while he lived among these savages, took good care to follow the
advice "never have a black fellow behind you;" and he relates a story
of a squatter who was walking in the bush with his black boy hunting
brush monkeys, when the boy touched him on the shoulder from behind
and said, "Let me go ahead." When the squatter asked why he wished to
go before him, the native answered, "Because I feel such an
inclination to kill you."

Dalton (266) says of the Oraons in India: "It is doubtful if they see
any moral guilt in murder." But the most astounding race of
professional murderers are the Dyaks of Borneo. "Among them," says
Earl, "the more heads a man has cut off, the more he is respected."
"The white man reads," said a Dyak to St. John: "_we_ hunt heads
instead." "Our Dyaks," says Charles Brooke, "were eternally requesting
to be allowed to go for heads, and their urgent entreaties often bore
resemblance to children crying after sugar-plums." "An old Dyak,"
writes Dalton, "loves to dwell upon his success on these hunting
excursions, and the terror of the women and children taken affords a
fruitful theme of amusement at their meetings." Dalton speaks of one
expedition from which seven hundred heads were brought home. The young
women were carried off, the old ones killed and all the men's heads
were cut off. Not that the women always escaped. Among the Dusun, as a
rule, says Preyer,

"the heads were obtained in the most cowardly way possible,
a woman's or child's being just as good as a man's ... so,
as easier prey, the cowards seek them by lying in ambush
near the plantations."

Families are sometimes surprised while asleep and their heads cut off.
Brooke tells of a man who for awhile kept company with a countrywoman,
and then slew her and ran off with her head. "It ought to be called
_head-stealing_ not _head-hunting,"_ says Hatton; and Earl remarks:

"The possession of a human head cannot be considered as a proof
of the bravery of the owner for it is not necessary that he
should have killed the victim with his own hands, his friends
being permitted to assist him or even to perform the act
themselves."

It is to be noted that the Dyaks[7] are not in other respects a fierce
and diabolical race, but are at home, as Doty attests, "mild, gentle,
and given to hospitality." I call special attention to this by way of
indirectly answering an objection frequently urged against my theory:
"How is it possible to suppose that a nation so highly civilized as
the Greeks of Plato's time should have known love for women only in
its lower, carnal phases?" Well, we have here a parallel case. The
Dyaks are "mild, gentle, and hospitable," yet their chief delight and
glory is murder! And as one of the main objects of this book is to
dwell on the various obstacles which impeded the growth of romantic
love, it will be interesting to glance for a moment at the causes
which prevented the Dyaks from recognizing the sanctity of life.
Superstition is one of them; they believe that persons killed by them
will be their slaves in the next world. Pride is another. "How many
heads did your father get?" a Dyak will ask; and if the number given
is less than his own, the other will say, "Well, then you have no
occasion to be proud." A man's rank in this world as in the next
depends on the number of his skulls; hence the owner of a large number
may be distinguished by his proud bearing. But the head hunter's
strangest and strongest motive is _the desire to please women_! No
Dyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed a
man, and in times when the chances for murder were few and far
between, suitors have been compelled to wait a year or two before they
could bag a skull and lead home their blushing bride. The weird
details of this mode of courtship will be given in the chapter on
Island Love on the Pacific.


SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.

In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the
sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at
this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the
victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer
to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of
slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine
myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment. The love of a
mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the
earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger
than death. If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful
instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter
of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.

In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up
only a few children in each family--usually two boys and a girl--the
others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction
than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens. The Kurnai
tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind. "The
aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving
an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp" (Fison and
Howitt, 14). The Indians of both North and South America were addicted
to the practice of infanticide. Among the Arabs the custom was so
inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called
upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it. In the
words of Professor Robertson Smith (281):

"Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the
women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization,
still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a
promise not to commit child-murder."

Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their
custom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics. Dalton (288-90)
relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in
1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a single
female child could be found. The British Government rescued a number
of girls and brought them up, giving them an education. Some of these
were afterward given in marriage to respectable Kandh bachelors,

"and it was expected that they at least would not outrage
their own feeling as mothers by consenting to the
destruction of their offspring. Subsequently, however,
Colonel Campbell ascertained that these ladies had no female
children, and, on being closely questioned, they admitted
that at their husbands' bidding they had destroyed them."

In the South Sea Islands "not less than two-thirds of the children
were murdered by their own parents." Ellis (_P.R_., I., 196-202) knew
parents who had, by their own confession, killed four, six, eight,
even ten of their children, and the only reason they gave was that it
was the custom of the country.

"_No sense of irresolution or horror appeared to exist_ in
the bosoms of those parents, who deliberately resolved on
the deed before the child was born." "The murderous parents
often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost before
their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and
spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or
with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs
over the persuasions of their teachers."

They refused to spare babies even when the missionaries offered to
take care of them (II., 23). Neither Ellis, during a residence of
eight years, nor Nott during thirty years' residence on the South Sea
Islands, had known a single mother who was not guilty of this crime of
infanticide. Three native women who happened to be together in a room
one day confessed that between them they had killed twenty-one
infants--nine, seven, and five respectively.

These facts have long been familiar to students of anthropology, but
their true significance has been obscured by the additional
information that many tribes addicted to infanticide, nevertheless
displayed a good deal of "affection" toward those whom they spared. A
closer examination of the testimony reveals, however, that there is no
true affection in these cases, but merely a shallow fondness for the
little ones, chiefly for the sake of the selfish gratification it
affords the parents to watch their gambols and to give vent to
inherited animal instincts. True affection is revealed only in
self-sacrifice; but the disposition to sacrifice themselves for their
children is the one quality most lacking in these child-murderers.
Sentimentalists, with their usual lack of insight and logical sense,
have endeavored to excuse these assassins on the ground that necessity
compelled them to destroy their infants. Their arguments have misled
even so eminent a specialist as Professor E.B. Tylor into declaring
(_Anthropology,_ 427) that "infanticide comes from hardness of life
rather than from hardness of heart." What he means, may be made clear
by reference to the case of the Arabs who, living in a desert country,
were in constant dread of suffering from scarcity of food; wherefore,
as Robertson Smith remarks (281), "to bury a daughter was regarded not
only as a virtuous but as a generous deed, which is intelligible if
the reason was that there would be fewer mouths to fill in the tribe."
This explains the murders in question but does not show them to be
excusable; it explains them as being due to the vicious selfishness
and hard-heartedness of parents who would rather kill their infants
than restrain their sexual appetite when they had all the children
they could provide for.

In most cases the assassins of their own children had not even as much
semblance of an excuse as the Arabs. Turner relates (284) that in the
New Hebrides the women had to do all the work, and as it was supposed
that they could not attend to more than two or three, all the others
were buried alive; in other words the babes were murdered to save
trouble and allow the men to live in indolence. In the instances from
India referred to above, various trivial excuses for female
infanticide were offered: that it would save the expenses connected
with the marriage rites; that it was cheaper to buy girls than to
bring them up, or, better still, to steal them from other tribes; that
male births are increased by the destruction of female infants; and
that it is better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them
to grow up and become causes of strife afterward. Among the Fijians,
says Williams (154, 155), there is in infanticide "no admixture of
anything like religious feeling or fear, but _merely whim, expediency,
anger, or indolence_." Sometimes the general idea of woman's
inferiority to man underlies the act. They will say to the pleading
missionary: "Why should she live? Will she wield a club? Will she
poise a spear?"

But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide
reached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their children
because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; or
because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to
suffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because they
liked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no other
reason than because they could not make them stop crying. So they
buried them alive though they might be months or even years old
(Ellis, _P.R_., IV., 240).

These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardness
of heart"--sensual, selfish indulgence--that smothers the parental
instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be
a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the
scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring.
In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a
rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point
because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge
and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of
romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings.
But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on that
there are other things in which animals are superior not only to
savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.


HONORABLE POLYGAMY

Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find
further interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow.
The monogamous sentiment--the feeling that a man and his wife belong
to each other exclusively--is now so strong that a person who commits
bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprison
him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable
people will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to make
polygamy a feature of their religion, but in 1882 Congress passed a
law suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamous
sentiment exist "always and everywhere?"

Livingstone relates (_M.S.A._, I., 306-312) that the King of the
Beetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor had
only one wife:

"When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country,
people could not marry until they were of a mature age, and
then could never have more than one wife, he said it was
perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could
submit voluntarily to such laws."

He himself had five wives and one of these queens

"remarked very judiciously that such laws as ours would not
suit the Beetjuans because there were so great a number of
women and the male population suffered such diminutions from
the wars."

Sir Samuel Baker (_A.N._, 147) says of the wife of the Chief of
Latooka:

"She asked many questions, how many wives I had? and was
astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This
amused her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her
daughter at the idea."

In Equatorial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that he
can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and calls
him a stingy fellow if he declines to do so" (Reade, 259). Livingstone
(_N.E.Z._, 284) says of the Makalolo women:

"On hearing that a man in England could marry but one wife,
several ladies exclaimed that they would not like to live in
such a country; that they could not imagine how English
ladies could relish such a custom, for, in their way of
thinking, every man of respectability should have a number
of wives, as a proof of his wealth. Similar ideas prevail
all down the Zambesi."

Some amusing instances are reported by Burton (_T.T.G.L._, I., 36, 78,
79). The lord of an African village appeared to be much ashamed
because he had only two wives. His sole excuse was that he was only a
boy--about twenty-two. Regarding the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, Burton
says: "Polygamy is, of course, the order of the day; it is a necessity
to the men, and even the women disdain to marry a 'one-wifer.'" In his
book on the Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, G.S. Robertson writes:

"It is considered a reproach to have only one wife, a
sign of poverty and insignificance. There was on one
occasion a heated discussion at Kamdesh concerning the
best plans to be adopted to prepare for an expected
attack. A man sitting on the outskirts of the assembly
controverted something the priest said. Later on the
priest turned round fiercely and demanded to be told
how a man with 'only one wife' presumed to offer an
opinion at all."

His religion allowed a Mohammedan to take four legitimate wives, while
their prophet himself had a larger number. A Hindoo was permitted by
the laws of Manu to marry four women if he belonged to the highest
caste, but if he was of the lowest caste he was condemned to monogamy.

King Solomon was held in honor though he had unnumbered wives,
concubines, and virgins at his disposal.

How far the sentiment of monogamy--one of the essential ingredients of
Romantic Love--had penetrated the skulls of American Indians may be
inferred from the amusing and typical details related by the historian
Parkman (_O.T._, chap. xi.) of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, among whom
he sojourned. The man most likely to become the next chief was a
fellow named Mahto-Tatonka, whose father had left a family of thirty,
which number the young man was evidently anxious to beat:

"Though he appeared not more than twenty-one years old,
he had oftener struck the enemy, and stolen more horses
and more squaws than any young man in the village. We
of the civilized world are not apt to attach much
credit to the latter species of exploits; but
horse-stealing is well-known as an avenue to
distinction on the prairies, and the other kind of
depredation is esteemed equally meritorious. Not that
the act can confer fame from its own intrinsic merits.
Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward
to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor,
the easy husband for the most part rests content; his
vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that
quarter is averted. Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful
and mean-spirited transaction. The danger is averted,
but the glory of the achievement also is lost.
Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and
dashing fashion. Out of several dozen squaws whom he
had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for
one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the
injured husband, had defied the extremity of his
indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the hand
of violence upon him. He was following close in the
footsteps of his father. The young men and the young
squaws, each in their way, admired him. The one would
always follow him to war, and he was esteemed to have
an unrivalled charm in the eyes of the other."

Thus the admiration of the men, the love (Indian style) of the women,
and the certainty of the chieftainship--the highest honor accessible
to an Indian--were the rewards of actions which in a civilized
community would soon bring such a "brave" to the gallows. Some of the
agencies by which the belief that wife-stealing and polygamy are
honorable was displaced by the modern sentiment in favor of monogamy,
will be considered later on. Here I simply wish to enforce the
additional moral that not only the _ideas_ regarding bigamy and
polygamy have changed, but the _emotions_ aroused by such actions;
execration having taken the place of admiration. Judging by such
cases, is it likely that ideas concerning women and love could change
so utterly as they have since the days of the ancient Greeks, without
changing the emotions of love itself? Sentiments consist of ideas and
emotions. If both are altered, the sentiments must have changed as a
matter of course. Let us take as a further example the sentiment of
modesty.


CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY

There are many Christian women who, if offered the choice between
death and walking naked down the street, would choose death as being
preferable to eternal disgrace and social suicide. If they preferred
the other alternative, they would be arrested and, if known to be
respectable, sent to an insane asylum. The English legend relates that
"peeping Tom" was struck blind because he did not stay in the house as
commanded when the good Lady Godiva was obliged to ride naked through
the market-place. So strong, indeed, is the sentiment of modesty in
our community that the old-fashioned philosophers used to maintain it
was an innate instinct, always present under normal conditions. The
fact that every child has to be gradually taught to avoid indecent
exposure, ought to have enlightened these philosophers as to their
error, which is further made plain to the orthodox by the Biblical
story that in the beginning of human life the man and his wife were
both naked and not ashamed.

Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man wherever
climatic and other motives do not prescribe dress. Writing of the
Arabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (_N.T.A_., 265):

"Numbers of young girls and women were accustomed to
bathe perfectly naked in the river just before our
tent. I employed them to catch small fish for bait; and
for hours they would amuse themselves in this way,
screaming with excitement and fun, and chasing the
small fry with their long clothes in lieu of nets;
their figures were generally well-shaped.... The men
were constantly bathing in the clear waters of the
Athabara, and were perfectly naked, although close to
the women; we soon became accustomed to this daily