The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family by Ch. Letourneau - HTML preview

CHAPTER X.
 PROSTITUTION AND CONCUBINAGE.

I. Concubinage in General.—Frequency and reason of polygamic instincts—Palliatives of monogamy.

II. Prostitution.—Primitive prostitution—Slow rise of scruples—Specialisation of prostitution in civilised societies—Prostitution in the ancient States of Central America, in China and Japan—The right of the father, and prostitution in Japan—Prostitution in India—Religious prostitution—Prostitution in Europe.

III. Various Forms of Concubinage.—The concubinate—Concubine captives in Judæa and Homeric Greece—Some modern facts of the same kind—Slave concubines in Africa, in Abyssinia, and Madagascar—Legal concubinate in Central America—Categories of the concubinate in Mexico—The “lesser wives” in Tartary and China—Concubines in Assyria, among the Arabs, and in India—Greek hetaïrism—The concubinate in ancient Rome—The concubinate of the primitive catholic clergy—Concubines “by precaution”—Contemporary concubinage—Why it does not exist in Kabyle—The evolution of concubinage.

I. Concubinage in General.

As a connecting link between polygamy and monogamy, concubinage deserves special study.

Between institutions, as between organised beings, there is no sudden leap. Societies evolve slowly; it is by degrees that customs become refined, and that laws are formulated of a less and less brutal kind. It has been with marriage as with everything else. To the confusion of primitive bestial unions, when polygamy after the manner of chimpanzees prevailed, have succeeded sexual associations regulated by laws and customs. I have successively described these outlines or primitive forms of marriage, ending with polygamy, which itself is not incompatible with a somewhat advanced civilisation, but which generally, by its restrictions, soon develops a tendency towards monogamy.

The abyss is not so very great that separates polygamic from monogamic marriage.

As we have seen, primitive man, besides having a purely animal absence of modesty, has generally polygamic instincts, and nothing can be more natural, since he descends from anthropoid precursors, and the great monkeys are habitually polygamous. But the solidity of instincts, moral or immoral, is always in proportion to the duration of their rise. Now, during enormous chronological periods or cycles, in comparison with which the historic ages of humanity are but a moment, our nearest animal ancestors and our prehistoric percursors have, as far as it was possible, lived in a polygamic régime. It is therefore quite natural that most men, even in the present time, should be much inclined to polygamy, and that primitive societies should only have emerged slowly and imperfectly from it, while tempering monogamic marriage by polygamic palliatives. Of these palliatives the two principal ones still in use amongst the most civilised peoples are prostitution and concubinage, which last becomes a concubinate when legalised.

II. Prostitution.

It would certainly be out of place here to give a detailed history of prostitution. Having, besides, repeatedly spoken of it in the preceding chapters, I may now confine myself to recapitulating the chief traits of its evolution. In primitive societies, as we know, it is general, and in no way blamed. Free girls and women willingly sell themselves, and more often still, they are an article of traffic for their parents, like any other merchandise.

No idea of shame as yet attaches to sexual unions considered in themselves. Prostitution is a simple barter which shocks no one, and venal love is merely restrained by respect for the property of another. Women who are already appropriated, or possessed by a man, are in principle respected, but solely by the same title as any other property. Their masters, their husbands, those who have bought or captured them, have a perfect right to hire them out to whomsoever they will, as the Australian husbands do, and as the Polynesian ones did.

When the appropriation of women, polygamic as much as possible, became general, the more than fickle instincts of primitive man persisted none the less; and, as a matter of fact, it is then that prostitution, in the modern sense of the word, first arose. Outside the majority of women, regularly belonging to husband-proprietors, there existed, in much smaller numbers, women trafficking their persons, either voluntarily for their own profit, or for that of their legal possessors. At Senaar, for example, and in many other countries, merchants and slave-dealers trade very profitably in their feminine live stock.

We know also that, in primitive Athens, the most eminent men possessed troops of prostitutes, and drew a large revenue from them; for it is very slowly that prostitution, and all that relates to it, has awakened any scruple in the human conscience.

Even at the most glorious period of Hellenic civilisation, with what consideration were the most distinguished hetaïræ still regarded, since Socrates and Pericles willingly met at the house of Aspasia!

In all the more or less cultivated societies of the old or new world prostitution has flourished or continues to flourish. It is even in refined societies alone that prostitution becomes specialised and legalised, and ends by being regulated, by becoming, in short, a kind of institution, supplementing legal marriage and being concurrent with it.

Everywhere—in all countries, and among all races—prostitution has been, or continues to be, tolerated, and sometimes even honoured. It existed in the great states of Central America, in ancient Peru, in ancient Mexico, and in Nicaragua, where there were already prostitutes and brothels. In this last country the morals were still so impure, and continence, although very relative, so difficult to bear, that at a certain annual festival the women of all classes were authorised to abandon themselves to whomsoever they pleased.[452]

In the great societies founded by the Mongoloid races, or the Mongols of Asia, prostitution displays itself in the open day. In China, tea-houses abound, although the ancient morality of the Celestial Empire makes chastity a moral duty for unmarried girls and women. In Cochin-China and Japan, on the contrary,[453] practice and theory are in accord. No moral brand of shame attaches to the prostitute. In Cochin-China, says Finlayson,[454] a father has the right to give his daughter, for a small sum of money, to a visitor or even a stranger, without the reputation of the young girl suffering any harm, and without any hindrance to her finding a suitable husband afterwards. In Japan the tea-houses (tsiaya) are more numerous still than in China; in the large towns they form vast quarters, and some of them are very luxurious. The mode of recruiting for inmates seems at first improbable to a European, and this alone suffices to show the relativity of morality.

Everywhere “the right of the father of a family” over his children has begun by being unlimited. In Japan it is still excessive, even over married daughters. Thus M. Bousquet, who was travelling in Japan a few years ago, relates that as he was lodging one day in the house of a young married couple, the father of the wife offered her to him, and the husband did not dream of protesting.[455]

A daughter represents a certain amount of capital, belonging first to the father and then to the husband; to alienate it without the consent of the proprietor is a theft, but with his authorisation the action becomes lawful, and therefore parents who are in difficulties negotiate their daughter without any intervention by the Japanese law. A young girl is even admired when she prostitutes herself from devotion. “The Japanese romances repeat to satiety the story of the virtuous virgin who voluntarily submits to this servitude in order to save her father from misery, or to pay the debts of her betrothed.”[456] In Japan, houses of prostitution are a national institution; the law regulates the costume of the women who inhabit them, and the duration of their stay. On this point Europe has little to envy Japan. But what is special to Japan is that the tikakie, the inmates of these houses, are placed there by their parents themselves, and for a price that is debated beforehand. These inmates of the tea-houses generally enter them from the age of fourteen or fifteen years, to live there till they are twenty-five years old. They are taught to dance, to sing, to play the guitar, and to write letters. They are lodged in handsome apartments, where men go to see them openly and without any mystery.

They are in no way dishonoured by their trade; many of them marry very well afterwards; it even happens that respectable citizens go to seek an agreeable wife in these houses of pleasure. The most beautiful among them are celebrated. After their death their portraits are placed in the temples. “In the temple of Asaxa,” says M. Bousquet, “is found a painting representing several Japanese ladies in full dress; they are, my guides tell me, the portraits of the most celebrated courtesans of Yeddo, which are annually placed here in their honour.” So also Dr. Schliemann reports that he has seen statues of deified courtesans in the Japanese temples. Their celestial intervention was implored in an original manner. The suppliants first wrote a prayer on a paper, then masticated the request and rolled it into a bullet, which they shot with an air-gun at the statues of these strange divinities.[457]

It is clear that the Japanese differ very much from us in their idea of feminine virtue. They have an idea, however, and do not in the least permit the women to love as they please. Thus the girl who gives herself to a lover without paternal authorisation is legally punished by sixty lashes with a whip, and the Japanese public would not endure in a play the personage of a young girl in love.[458]

It is not the chastity of woman, as we understand it, but her subjection, that Japanese morality requires. The woman is a thing possessed, and her immorality consists simply in disposing freely of herself.

As regards prostitution, Brahmanic India is scarcely more scrupulous than Japan, and there again we find religious prostitution practised in the temples, analogous to that which in ancient Greece was practised at Cyprus, Corinth, Miletus, Tenedos, Lesbos, Abydos, etc.[459]

According to the legend, the Buddha himself, Sakyamouni, when visiting the famous Indian town of Vesali, was received there by the great mistress of the courtesans.[460]

But the Brahmins have not been more strict in what concerns prostitution than the founder of the great Buddhist religion. On this point the accounts of travellers and missionaries supplement the silence of the Code of Manu. The writers of Lettres édifiantes found religious prostitution openly practised in the Brahmanic temples. “The people have put,” writes one of them, “the idol named Coppal in a neighbouring house; there she is served by priests and by Devadachi, or slaves of the gods. These are prostitute girls, whose employment is to dance and to ring little bells in cadence while singing infamous songs, either in the pagoda, or in the streets when the idol is carried out in state.”[461] In this case it was a matter of actual commerce, of trading for the profit of the priests, and the latter had recourse without any shame to what we call to-day the advertisement to attract the customers. “I heard,” relates the same missionary, “published with the blowing of a trumpet, that there was danger in frequenting the Devadachi who dwelt in the town; but that one could safely visit those who served in the temple of Coppal.”[462] An old traveller, Sonnerat, confirms the testimony of the missionaries of the seventeenth century. He affirms that, like all the other Hindoos, the Brahmins are much addicted to libertinage, and that, in their practical morality, it is not considered a fault to have commerce with a courtesan; that they have licentious books in which refined debauchery is taught ex professo; that they use love-charms, etc.[463]

I stop here, and purposely abstain from speaking of the prostitution of Europe. We know too well that it has always been very flourishing, as well in ancient Rome as in the Middle Ages, although they were so catholic. In old France it established itself boldly, in full daylight, to such a degree that some towns, that of Rouen for example, had their proxénètes jurés, wearing bronze medals with the arms of the town on them.[464] As for contemporary prostitution, it is superfluous to call attention to the fact that it is one of our great social diseases.

To sum up, the origin of prostitution goes back to the most primitive societies; it is anterior to all the forms of marriage, and it has persisted down to our own day in every country, and whatever might be the race, religion, form of government, or conjugal régime prevailing. Taken by itself, it would suffice to prove that monogamy is a type of marriage to which mankind has found it very difficult to bend itself; the very general existence of the concubinate completes the demonstration.

III. Various Forms of Concubinage.

Between animal love, that can be tasted with the prostitute, and the noblest monogamic union, there is a wide space, which the concubinate has filled. Legal concubinage or the concubinate, admitted and practised, as we shall see, in so many countries, is a sort of free marriage, tolerated by custom, recognised by law, and co-existing by the side of monogamic marriage, the rigour of which it palliates. It was at first a blending of polygamy with monogamy, and then, undergoing itself an evolution analogous to that which has caused the adoption by degrees of legal monogamy among nearly all civilised peoples, it ended by becoming in its turn monogamic in ancient Rome. I will briefly retrace its ethnographical history.

In its primitive phase, still very confused, the concubinate has been simply the conjugal appropriation of slaves, especially of women captured after a victory. These were part of the rights of the victor; the captives were considered as booty, and shared in the same way. We have already seen in Deuteronomy that Moses authorises this barbarous practice, and that it was habitual also among the primitive Arabs. The Homeric warriors did the same, as various passages of the Iliad and Odyssey prove.

I will quote a few of them. To begin with, we find the old priest Chryses comes to offer Agamemnon a rich ransom for his daughter, and receives from the king of kings the brutal reply—“I will not set your daughter free: old age shall find her in my dwelling at Argos, far from her native land, weaving linen and sharing my bed. Go, then, and provoke me not.”[465]

Thersites, speaking to Agamemnon, is still more explicit—“Son of Atreus, what more dost thou require? What wilt thou? Thy tents are full of brass and of many most beautiful women, that we give first to thee, we, Acheans, when we take a town.”[466] Elsewhere, Achilles, speaking of his beloved Briseis, of whom he had been robbed, cries—“Why have the Atreides led hither this vast army? Is it not for the sake of the dark-haired Helen? Are they, then, the only men who love their wives? Every wise and good man cherishes and loves his wife. And I also loved Briseis from my heart, although she was a captive.”[467]

And, a little further on, he makes a clear distinction between the slave concubine and the legitimate wife, swearing never to accept as wife a daughter of Agamemnon.

In the Odyssey, when Ulysses enters unrecognised his own house, and sees pass before him in the vestibule his female slaves, laughing and joyous as they go to play with the suitors, his feelings are not merely those of a lawful proprietor who is offended, but of a jealous man whose harem has been violated. At first he is tempted to kill these women, which he actually does a little later, and he hears “his heart cry out in his bosom, as a bitch, turning around her young ones, barks at a stranger and tries to bite him.”[468]

But such customs have prevailed here and there up to modern times. In 1548, in Peru, when Pedro de la Gasca had defeated the party of Pizarro, he distributed amongst his followers the widows of the colonists who were killed.

At Asterabad, after a small local revolt, Hanway saw the Persian magistrates sell fifty women to the soldiers.

In Livonia, after the taking of Narva, Peter the Great coolly sold to the boyars the wives of the inhabitants.[469] Bruce tells us also that in Abyssinia the victors habitually take possession of the wives of the vanquished.[470]

But if captives serve or have served somewhat in all countries to supply the domestic concubinate, they were not the only ones reserved for this purpose; female slaves, however procured, were treated as such. The fact is so well known that I shall abstain from establishing it by examples. I only quote one observed at Sackatoo, in tropical Africa, for it proves clearly that in a barbarous country, concubinage, or the domestic and servile concubinate, does not outrage morality in any way, and is regarded merely from a commercial point of view. At Sackatoo, when a married man has intimate relations with one of the female slaves given as dowry to his wife, he need simply replace her the following day by another slave who is a virgin and of equal value. On this purely mercenary condition, the caprice of the husband never occasions any conflict with the legitimate wife.[471]

The relative and so-called Christian civilisation of the Abyssinians accommodates itself very easily to such customs. By the side of the oizoro, the proud and indolent matron, all the great nobles have a troop of pretty servant girls with sprightly looks.[472]

The king sets the example, and naturally he goes further still. If any woman has had the good luck to please him, he sends an envoy to invite her to live in the palace. This distinction is received as it should be: the lady adorns herself as quickly as possible, and obeys without a murmur; but above these concubines there is the wife or queen, the itighe.

As far as they can, ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate laic ones. Bruce found one, the Abba-Salam, guardian of the sacred fire, third personage in authority in the church, who forced women to yield to him by a threat at the same time pious and original—the fear of excommunication.

I have already spoken of the Malagasy concubinage, of the chief wife (vadi-be) having her own apartment and privileges, and ruling over the “lesser wives” (vadi-keli), who live together in equal submission.[473]

In short, the domestic concubinate is largely practised over all central or barbarous Africa.

The ancient half-civilised nations of central America did not disdain it either. In Peru, as we shall see, the monogamic régime was obligatory, but only for the poorer people.

In the Maya nations, the rich and powerful practised the concubinate without any moderation.[474] At Guatemala, the parents were filled with solicitude on this point, and when a young noble married a girl of his own rank who had not yet attained puberty, they were careful to keep him patient by giving him a young slave as concubine, whose children, however, would not be his heirs.[475]

In Mexico the were three kinds of concubines:—

1. Young girls not yet arrived at a marriageable age, and whom the parents usually chose for their sons at the request of the latter. These unions required neither ceremony nor contract, but they were often legitimated later, when they became fruitful.

2. Partially legitimate wives, who were also partially married, retaining only the characteristic trait of the conjugal ceremony—that is, the tying together of the garments of the half-married ones. These wives could not be repudiated without a motive, but neither they nor their children could inherit.

3. Lastly, the third class comprehended simple concubines, largely kept by the nobles, and who ranked not only lower than the legitimate wives, but also than the half-legitimate ones.[476] All this system is ingenious, and it is certainly difficult to state the gradation better.

However common the concubinate may be, nowhere do we find it so wisely combined as in ancient Mexico, where four sorts of sexual association were recognised—monogamic marriage, consecrated by law and religion; semi-legitimate marriage; free and durable union with a legitimable concubine; and lastly, free love, escaping all regulation.

I shall proceed soon to take an estimate of these customs, so different from our own, but it still remains for me to speak of the concubinate among the superior races, the yellow and the white. The Mongols of Tartary are monogamous in principle, in the sense of having one sole legitimate wife; but the rich and noble have by the side of this matron or chief wife, concubines or lesser wives, subject to the former, who has precedence and rules over them, who governs the household, and whose children are considered legitimate and have hereditary rights.[477]

In China, the concubinage of the Mongols has been carefully regulated, like everything else; it is naturally, as elsewhere, the privilege of the rich and great, who sometimes keep a veritable harem, and people it by purchasing pretty girls, scarcely arrived at puberty, from their parents (Macartney, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xxxiii. 473).[478] According to the current morality of China, the concubinate is blamed unless the legitimate wife remains sterile for ten or twelve years.[479] Formerly an attempt was made to restrain it, by only tolerating it for the mandarins and childless quadragenarians;[480] but these severe measures have fallen into desuetude.

At the present day the Chinese concubinate has no other check than human respect and public opinion. It is perfectly legal. The first or chief wife is an honoured matron; she commands the lesser wives, who owe her respect and obedience. If a husband attempts to lower her to the rank of lesser wife, he incurs the bastonnade with a hundred strokes of the bamboo, but ninety only if, on the contrary, he tries to raise a lesser wife to the supreme rank.[481] The legal concubines, the lesser wives, are subordinate to the especially legitimate wife, and are forbidden to assume the dress reserved for her.[482] The chief wife is the mistress of the house; she is not only the mother of her own children, but also the putative mother of the children of the lesser wives. The latter children wear mourning for her and not for their natural mother; and it is on the legal mother that they lavish the expressions of their respect, affection, and obedience.[483] We learn from Chinese comedies that rivalries sometimes break out between the matron and her fellow wives; but in general the Chinese woman is so well trained, so well broken in from infancy, that this is rare enough, and Chinese wives have even been known to counsel their husbands to take concubines in the towns where they may be long detained by business.[484] It is well to remember, by the way, that the human brain can retain all kinds of impressions, and that morality and instincts strictly result from the nature of the life and education.

The concubinate must actually have been necessary for man, for we see it practised by all races, and by the white races as well as the others.

We know that the monarchs of ancient Assyria had, by the side of the single wife, a good number of concubines, exactly like the Abyssinian negroes of our own days, or, to keep to antiquity, like the glorious Solomon.

Polygamous as they are, the modern Arabs do not on that account abstain from the concubinate. Even at Mecca all the rich men keep in their houses, with their legitimate wives, concubines who are generally natives of Abyssinia. However, if one of these women becomes a mother, the morality of the country requires her master to raise her to the rank of legitimate wife.[485] The Mekavy of the middle and lower class also buy young Abyssinian slaves, teach them to cook and to sew, make concubines of them, and re-sell them afterwards advantageously to passing strangers, especially if they have been sterile;[486] in this commerce they unite pleasure and profit.

The concubinate is not more rare among the Aryans than the Semites. The monarchs of ancient Persia had, we know, a troop of concubines; and in all the great barbarian societies, the princely concubinate is only the survival of old customs.

In India the Brahmins of the middle class often have one chief wife, and at the same time several domestic concubines.[487]

We have seen that in Homeric Greece the concubinate was a general practice, and in no way censured. In later times, when Greece was more civilised, the primitive domestic concubinate disappeared, but there always remained to alleviate the ennui of monogamic marriage what we call concubinage, or hetaïrism, which was openly practised by Socrates and Pericles. “If,” says Lecky on this subject, “we could imagine a Bossuet or a Fénelon figuring among the followers of Ninon de Lenclos, and publicly giving her counsel on the subject of her professional duties and the means of securing adorers, this would be hardly less strange than the relation which really existed between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota.”[488]

All societies which have had any legal form of marriage have adopted the concubinate, either free or more or less regulated, but it has nowhere been so precisely legalised as in ancient Rome. I shall say a few words about it, not that I intend to walk in the steps of our legists, but in order to show what assistance ethnographical sociology could be to the science of written law. By its means alone can the legal texts, which have been a hundred times studied, commented on, and criticised in an isolated manner, as if they related to sociological facts without analogy in the world, be connected with the general evolution of customs and institutions.

At the bottom, the Roman concubinate is essentially similar to the others; it has merely been legalised with more care, and transformed into an institution as regular as marriage proper. It was, besides, indispensable in a country where the right of marriage, the jus connubii, was restricted. The leges Julia and Papia Poppæa also expressly authorise it.

In short, the Roman concubinate was a free union between a man and a woman not wishing, or not being able, to marry.[489] It was lawful to have as concubine a woman with whom marriage was forbidden—an adulteress, an actress, a woman of bad life, or a freed slave. This last case was the most frequent, most moral, and the most protected by the laws.

The intention of the parties, revealed either by a formal declaration, or by the inequality of conditions, determined between marriage and the concubinate. The dowry was one of the signs which served to distinguish marriage from the concubinate.

The Roman concubinate was only, in fact, a marriage of inferior degree.[490] Thus a married man could not take a concubine. A bachelor could not have several at the same time.[491]

The concubinate implied paternity. The child was considered as a natural child of the father (naturalis, non vulgo conceptus), though he did not enter the father’s family or become his heir, but followed the status of his mother.[492]

The institution of the Roman concubinate evolved naturally, and its conditions were more and more ameliorated.

Under Constantine, the legitimation of children born from a concubinate was permitted in a general way by marriage between the father and the woman who had been his concubine up to the day of marriage. It was necessary, however, that the man should not have at the time a legitimate child. But Justinian authorised the legitimation even in this last case; he granted also the benefit of legitimation to the children of an enfranchised slave marrying her master, provided that the latter had not then any legitimate children.[493]

When Christian marriage had definitely abolished the Roman legal concubinate, custom naturally braved the laws, and the clergy themselves were the first to set the example, thus proving the truth of the assertion in Genesis, “It is not good for man that he should be alone.” For a long time the anointed of the Lord had wives or concubines. The latter took the place of the former when, by St. Boniface, St. Anselm, Hildebrand, etc., and the Councils, the marriage of priests had become an atrocious crime.

In 1171, at Canterbury, an investigation proved that the abbot-elect of St. Augustine had seventy children in a single village.[494] During many years a tax, called by an expressive name (culagium), was systematically levied by various princes on priests living in concubinage.[495] Better still, it often happened that the lay parishioners obliged their priests to have concubines, by way of precaution. A canon of the Council of Palencia (1322) anathematises the laics who act thus.[496] In his History of the Council of Trent, Sarpi says that many Swiss cantons had adopted this custom. At the Council of Constance, an important speaker, Nicolas de Clemangis, declared that it was a widely-spread practice, and that the laity were firmly persuaded that the celibacy of the priests was quite fictitious. Bayle quotes on this point the following remarkable passage—“Taceo de fornicationibus et adulteriis a quibus qui alieni sunt probro cæteris ac ludibrio esse solent, spadonesque aut sodomitæ appellantur; denique laici usque adeo persuasum habent nullos cælibes esse, ut in plerisque parochiis non aliter velint presbyterum tolerare nisi concubinam habeat, quo vel sic suis sit consultum uxoribus, quæ nec sic quidem usque quaque sunt extra periculum.”

If, leaving aside the middle age and its clergy, we cast our eyes around us in the most civilised and polished European societies, we see that the concubinate has indeed disappeared, but that its inferior form, concubinage, is very flourishing. Centuries of legal and religious restraint have not been able to uproot it, and the rigid monogamic marriage inscribed in our laws is constantly set at defiance by our customs. Nearly everywhere the number of births called illegitimate is on the increase. In France it constantly progresses—

Since that time the proportion has oscillated round 7.25 in France. But in Sweden, from 1776 to 1866, it has risen from 3.11 per cent. to 9.5. In Saxony the return has been 15.37 in 1862-1864.[497]

At Paris, according to the calculations of A. Bertillon, more than a tenth of the couples (40,000) were living in free union.

In fact, if we interrogate all races, all epochs, and all countries, we see that the concubinate and concubinage have flourished, and still flourish, by the side of legal marriage. One country alone is an exception to this—Kabyle. But the exception confirms the rule. If we find in Kabyle neither concubinage nor concubinate, neither free unions nor natural children, the reason is very simple. It is that outside marriage no sexual union is tolerated, and in case of illegitimate birth the mother and child are both put to death, whilst retaliation falls on the illegal father.[498]

The concubinate is therefore, or at least has been till now, natural to man. One may say, borrowing a locution from Bossuet, that this is proved by “the experience of all the centuries.” It remains for me now to deduce from the facts I have enumerated a sketch of the general evolution which they represent, and to estimate their moral significance. The evolution is of the simplest. Sexual union, without restraint or law, has been the commencement. Then the right of the strongest or the richest has created polygamic households. In these households the priority was at last bestowed on one wife; but as the husband did not intend to curb his changing humour, he kept by the side of the chief spouse either slaves or “lesser wives,” to whom, in the end, a legal position was accorded. The monogamic régime making more and more way, the time came—at Rome, for example—when this disguised polygamy was no longer tolerated, and the concubinate became a marriage of the second order, being unable to co-exist with the other. At length there was a pretence of abolishing it, and there was no other matrimonial type legally recognised except the monogamic union, lasting till the death of the husband or wife. But custom has rebelled against the law, and monogamy has been more apparent than real. Prostitution for the least refined, adultery and free union for the others, have served as safety-valves for inclinations too inveterate and too violent to be controlled by legal texts. Has moral purity gained thereby? Surely not. Moreover, there is in consequence a whole population of illegitimate children, too often abandoned by their fathers, and suffering from their birth a legal indignity of the most iniquitous kind. Hence arise a thousand unmerited sufferings, which legislation must some day or other remedy, and from which the legal concubinate has spared China, for example. Doubtless the ideal is a fine thing, but it is folly to sacrifice the real to it, and to legislate without taking into account the requirements of human nature.