It is extremely probable that in primitive man marriage only lasted till the birth of a child, or at the most a few years. With civilization the duration of marriage has been prolonged, higher motives having become added to bodily charms, sexual appetite and the instinct of procreation, and tending toward more lasting unions.
Moral reasons have given rise to laws of protection in marriage, but the mania which man possesses of dogmatizing on everything has often caused these laws to degenerate into abuse or religious absurdities. In this way the modern form of our Christian monogamy has been imposed by a tyrannical dogma of the Roman Church; a dogma which no doubt started from an ideal point of view, but fell into disuse in practice, owing to the fact that it did not take sufficient account of the natural conditions and sexual requirements of the race. This explains the present tendency to greater legal liberty, even when the moral causes which tend to render monogamous unions durable multiply with the progress of civilization.
HISTORY OF EXTRA-CONJUGAL SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
As monogamous marriage exists among the anthropoid apes, we have every reason to believe that it existed with primitive man. In neither case has it been the result of artificial laws, but the result of brute force and congenital instincts inherited by natural evolution. It often happened that one male vanquished another and took possession of the female, or wife, of the vanquished. Others abducted the female by surprise. Later on, marriage by exchange or by purchase, derived from marriage by rape, probably constituted the first stage toward a legal monogamous or polygamous union, as an element in the most primitive human conventional organizations. In this way we can imagine the main points of the prehistoric evolution of marriage.
When the conception of marriage took on a legal character, either that of possession by the male, or that of a more or less equitable contract between the two sexes, we can easily imagine that sexual intercourse apart from marriage resulted as an inevitable complement. Every artificial barrier which the human mind opposes to natural instincts immediately gives rise to a movement of opposition on the part of the latter. The matrimonial laws of primitive or semi-civilized races punished adultery in the most barbarous manner by torture and death, but were unable to prevent the sexual passions pursuing their course in one way or another.
Certain abuses or exceptions had, therefore, to be tolerated, or certain complementary institutions had to be organized. However, these laws generally branded all forms of sexual intercourse apart from marriage, with the stigma of inferiority, or contempt, if not of crime. The woman, being the weaker, was naturally the one to suffer most from this stigma and its consequences.
The great diversity in the customs of different human tribes, makes it necessary, in order to avoid errors, to guard against generalizing without strong reasons. We cannot, however, here enter into details which would lead us too far. We can, however, affirm that among the lower or primitive races brute force played the principal role and was the fundamental support of marriage, while in higher civilizations legal regulation took the upper hand, however absurd or even immoral it might be.
Illegal or extra-conjugal forms of sexual intercourse have always formed two principal groups: prostitution and concubinage. No doubt, these two varieties are insensibly connected by numerous shades of transition, but as their development depends on different principles we must distinguish these two forms.
Prostitution is a trade in which a human being sells her body for money, while concubinage consists in more or less free sexual intercourse apart from marriage, the motive of which is simply the sexual appetite, convenience or love, although sometimes violence plays a part in it. We therefore find in extra-marital sexual intercourse the same motives as in legal unions; legal or religious sanction only is wanting.
It is needless to say that the motives which lead to concubinage may be more or less tainted by interested calculation. In all civilizations concubinage and prostitution constitute the complement of legal marriage. Their regulation has ever produced the singular results of surrounding them with a moral nimbus.