In lamaic Thibet they do not regard adultery as a tragedy. The wife is corrected, and the lover pays a fine to the husband, or husbands, when there are several.[668]
Chinese legislation is relatively moderate in regard to adultery. In the first place it expressly forbids the husband to lend or let out his wife, under pain of twenty-four strokes with the bamboo.[669] The Chinese woman can certainly be imprisoned for adultery,[670] but she is chiefly punished by repudiation, which is obligatory on the husband on pain of twenty strokes of the bamboo.[671] She can, however, be sold either by the husband or by the judge to whom the offended husband remits her.[672] In contrast to certain barbarous legislations, the Chinese law is more severe in regard to adultery for the strong than for the weak. “Whoever, on the strength of his power or credit, shall take away the wife or the daughter of a free man to make her his own wife, shall be imprisoned for the usual time and put to death by strangulation.”[673]
In Japan the law gives the offended husband the cruel and very general right to kill the guilty ones if taken in adultery, and forbids him to spare one.[674] We find this latter injunction, perhaps more humane than it appears, in ancient Roman legislation and elsewhere.
Nothing is at once more monotonous and more ghastly than this ethnographic review of the penalties against adultery.
Simple death has not sufficed to punish this crime, so enormous has it everywhere seemed; and thus other refinements of cruelty have been added—disembowelling, cutting in pieces, the stake, etc.
So far, among the races we have been investigating, Chinese legislation has been the wisest and most just, since, contrary to usual custom, it enacts the most severe penalties against the powerful man who takes advantage of his social position to commit adultery. Here and there, however, we find societies where adultery excites less fury. These societies are rare, and they are not always the most civilised.
At Java, for example, adultery is treated with clemency, especially if it is not committed with the chief wife. Even in this last case the guilty one, at least the man, is often only punished by public contempt.[675] The Dyaks punish conjugal infidelity with a fine only, for both parties.[676] This is a rare example of clemency, and it is given by a still barbarous race. We look in vain for such moderation among much more civilised peoples, as we shall see in studying ancient Egypt and the Berbers and Semites.
VIII. Adultery among the Egyptians, the Berbers, and the Semites.
Diodorus tells us that in ancient Egypt the man who was guilty of adultery received a thousand lashes, whilst the woman suffered the amputation of her nose, a very special penalty, which we have seen used in America and negro Africa, which we shall find also among the Saxons of England, and for which Diodorus has given us the reason. “The legislator,” he says, “has intended to deprive the woman of attractions which she had only made use of for seduction.”[677]
The Bible, also, is not tender towards adulterers. But it makes no distinction between the culpability of the man and the woman; stoning is for both. This terrible punishment is not only inflicted on the faithless wife, but on the inconstant fiancée. The accomplices even are put to death. There are, however, some distinctions, and precautions are taken to mitigate the rigour of the law; thus the guilty woman is only condemned to be stoned if the crime has been committed in the city. If in the fields, the man alone incurs stoning;[678] it is thus admitted that the woman may have suffered violence. Besides this, two witnesses are in all cases necessary to establish the crime. Lastly, the slave woman is not punished with death.[679]