In New Caledonia the children are betrothed by the parents almost from the moment of birth.[269] In Africa, among the black races, and notably the Hottentots, whose women age fast, the prudent men retain, years in advance, the little girls destined to succeed their actual wives.[270] In Ashantee little girls of ten and twelve thus sold are already legally considered the wives of the acquirer, although they have not yet left their mothers, and any familiarity taken with them by another man is punished by a fine paid to the future owner.[271]
In Polynesia, also, the fathers, mothers, and relatives arranged the conjugal unions of the children years before these unions were actually possible.[272]
With the Moxos and the Chiquitos of South America premature marriages were such a settled order of things that there were no celibates above the age of fourteen for the men and twelve for the women. The Jesuit missionaries in America had completely adopted this native custom, and they often married young girls of ten to boys of twelve years. Naturally these child marriages entailed sometimes equally precocious widowhood. D’Orbigny states that he has seen among these tribes a widower of twelve and a widow of ten years.[273]
In the time of Marco Polo the Tartars of Asia celebrated marriages that were more singular still—the marriages of deceased children. The families drew up the contract as if their children had been living, solemnly celebrated a symbolic wedding, then burned not less solemnly the fictitious contract, which would be, they thought, the means of holding it good in the other world for the vanished young couple. Thenceforward an alliance existed between the contracting families as if the marriage had been real.[274]
Among the Reddies of India a young woman from sixteen to twenty years old is frequently married to a little boy of five or six. The wife then goes to live either with the father, or with an uncle, or a maternal cousin of her future husband. The children resulting from these extra-conjugal unions are attributed to the boy, who is reputed to be the legal husband. When once this boy has reached manhood his legitimate wife is old, and then he in his turn unites himself to the wife of another boy, for whom he also raises up pseudo-legitimate children.[275]
Child-marriages, at least of little girls, are still very common in India amongst the Brahmins, and it is not unusual to see sexagenarian Brahmins marry little girls of six or seven years, for whom they pay money.[276]
On this point, as on most others, our European ancestors have not been more delicate than the savage or barbarous races of other countries. Thus Plutarch tells us that in ancient Italy the girls were often married before the age of twelve years, but that they did not become wives before that age.[277]
At the present day the Russian peasants still frequently act like the Reddies of India, and it is not rare to see, under the Mir system, young boys of eight or ten years married to women of twenty-five or thirty. Very often, in this case, the chief of the family becomes the effective husband of the woman while the legal husband is growing up.[278]
II. Marriage by Servitude.
From all these facts we may evidently conclude that in societies of little or no cultivation the children are left absolutely to the discretion of the parents. The latter, having every possible right over their progeny, consider them as a property, and think it no crime to sell their daughters, pubescent or not, as soon as they constitute a negotiable value. This sale of daughters is even the most widely spread form of primitive marriage, or of what it is convenient to call so. In societies of some degree of civilisation, where exchange-values exist, as domestic animals, stores of provisions, or slaves, the sale of a daughter is argued and debated like any other transaction, and the merchandise is delivered for the price agreed on. In a more primitive state of civilisation, when man subsists chiefly by the chase, or fishing from day to day, and is not always rich enough to buy a wife, the exchange-values considered equivalent of the required daughter are often replaced by a certain amount of labour or services rendered to the parents, and hence results a special form of marriage—marriage by servitude.