As in ancient Rome, the law prohibits marriage between slaves and free persons.[550] It absolutely forbids marriage to the priests of Fo, and to those of the tao sect.[551] It orders public functionaries not to contract marriage with actresses, comedians, or musicians.[552] It seems that in ancient times, in China as in Greco-Latin antiquity, the father had the excessive right to unmarry his daughter, for to remedy this abuse the Chinese law pronounces the punishment of a hundred strokes of bamboo on the father-in-law who should send away his son-in-law in order to re-marry his daughter to another.[553] The Chinese widow, no longer belonging to her original family, but to the family of her husband, can be re-married by the latter.[554] Moreover, the contract of betrothal concluded between the parents having a legal value, the family of the betrothed man who dies before the conclusion of the marriage has the right to marry the bereaved fiancée, or false widow,[555] who, by-the-bye, is much honoured when she has the courage to devote herself to a celibate life.[556]
We have seen that Chinese women are excluded from inheritance; they have a right, however, in marrying, to a small dowry, either in money or furniture, but the value of it is optional. It must be at least a chest of drawers or a small trousseau, which the bridegroom is obliged to supply if the parents fail to do so. Moreover, he must also give the nuptial bed.[557] Primitive and even cruel as are the conditions and rules of Chinese marriage, the Chinese women submit to them not only without murmuring, but with a sort of devotion, broken in as they are by a long ancestral education. And besides, for the Chinese in general, it is a strict duty to marry, from a triple point of view—social, political, and religious. Everybody marries in the Celestial Empire, and the number of male celibates over twenty-four years of age is quite insignificant. If a suitable opportunity of marriage does not present itself, the parents, who are sovereign arbiters in this matter, do not hesitate to go to an orphanage to seek a son or daughter-in-law.[558]
In Japan, during the feudal age, the end of which we are now witnessing, marriage was nearly identical with Chinese marriage, and there would be nothing to say about it in particular, if during the last few years the fever of reformation, with which Japan is carried away, had not happily modified marriage, at least in practice, by giving the young girl a voice in the matter,[559] and by awakening in some Japanese consciences doubts on the subject of the prostitution of young girls. At the present moment, everything in Japan is being Europeanised, and the adaptation of our Civil Code to the old Japanese customs is only a question of time.
VI. Monogamy and Civilisation.
The foregoing facts are sufficiently numerous to enable us to deduce certain conclusions from them. These facts, taken as they are from nearly all the non-Aryan races, prove in the first place that the monogamic régime is in no way the appanage of the superior races, for among the lowest of human races some are monogamic. In regard to marriage, we find that primordial conditions impose the various forms of sexual union, quite independently of the caprice of individuals, or of the degree of culture and social development.
In attempting to estimate the moral worth of a people, a race, or a civilisation, we are much more enlightened by the position given to woman than by the legal type of the conjugal union. This type, besides, is usually more apparent than real. In many civilisations, both dead and living, legal monogamy has for its chief object the regulation of succession and the division of property. With much naïveté and effrontery, many legislators have sanctioned polygamy in reality by recognising the domestic concubinate by the side of legal monogamy. As for the position of the wife who is reputed to be specially legitimate, it is often much inferior to that enjoyed by the woman who lives under other conjugal régimes which are theoretically less elevated. In the greater number of countries more or less monogamic, which I have just passed in review, woman, whether married or not, has been subjected to extreme subordination. In an exceptional case she acquires a certain independence, where, thanks to maternal inheritance, she can become possessed of personal or real estate. It is to money alone, and not to the moralising influence of monogamy, that woman in barbarous countries owes the power of attaining a certain independence, for the two peoples who have granted it to her, the Egyptians in antiquity and the Touaregs of our own day, lived or live under a legislation which authorises polygamy. It is important also to notice that in the valley of the Nile, and in the Sahara, feminine emancipation is only the privilege of those women who belong to the ruling and propertied classes.
Upon the whole, in every country and in every time, woman, organically weaker than man, has been more or less enslaved by him, unless in the case where legislation has allowed her to use an artificial force to serve her as a shield. This fictitious force, before which virile brutality has lowered its flag, has been money, wherever the laws regulating succession have permitted women to raise themselves to the dignity of proprietors.
A similar lesson will be given us by the study of the monogamic régime among the white races of Asia and of Europe. There also we shall see riches serve woman as a defensive, and sometimes even offensive weapon, against the severity of laws and customs.
FOOTNOTES:
[499] Herbert Spencer, Sociology, vol. ii. p. 301.