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.