We must again note in certain tribes, the Khamtis, for example, the monogamic pre-eminence of the first wife.[387] It is one of those sociological analogies of which I have already spoken, and it is important to point it out.
Polygamy still prevails with the mountaineers of Bootan, concurrently with polyandry. It is often incestuous; a man willingly marries two sisters, the one an adult, the other younger. But no other incest is recognised or punished except that committed between son and mother.[388]
Farther north, among the Ostiaks, a man feels no repugnance to marrying several sisters,[389] and, in general, polygamy is very widely spread among the nomad Mongols. A Yakout, for example, if obliged to make frequent journeys, takes care to have a wife in every place at which he stops.[390]
The polygamic régime is also in great honour in the Mongolian archipelagoes of Asia, in the Palos Islands, in the Caroline Islands, etc. Among the Battas of Sumatra it evidently begins to be distasteful to the women, since the polygamous husband is obliged to assign to each of his wives a special hearth, and kitchen utensils of her own, with which she prepares her food apart, or with that of her husband, when she is on duty, and required by the master.[391]
In this chapter I confine myself to primitive polygamy, to that of the grossest savages or barbarians; but there are barbarians of every race and colour, and the roots of all superior civilisations necessarily go far down into primitive savagery. Now we have seen that the polygamic régime is prevalent throughout the world among races that are little cultivated; we may hence conclude that the most civilised nations must have begun with polygamy, and, in reality, it has been thus everywhere and always. In the various civilised societies, living or dead, marriage has commenced by being polygamous. It is a law which has few exceptions.
In ancient Peru, the Incas decreed monogamy to be obligatory for the lower classes. The Chinese attribute to Fo-Hi, their first sovereign, the institution of marriage. This legendary king is said to have raised them out of promiscuity. Such also was the rôle of Cecrops, in Greece, and the same thing happened in primitive India. About thirty years ago a number of erudite Europeans, especially the mythologists and linguists, were smitten with a blind love for the Indian hymns of the Rig-Veda. They set to work to torture these old Sanscrit texts, naturally obscure, and by subjecting them to a sort of linguistic examination, they wrung from them imaginary revelations. It was decided that a unique and marvellous race, primitively endowed with every virtue and capacity, had sprung up one fine day on some plateau or other of Central Asia. The most enthusiastic of them generously endowed these hypothetical Aryans with superhuman faculties. A French academician believed and declared that from the high plateaus of Pâmir they perceived the sea, distant, however, some hundreds of leagues; he affirms that they understood the “circles of the stars,” and were omniscient. It is to be presumed that this model race was of necessity monogamous, since it was perfect. To-day, however, we must demolish all these castles in the air, too lightly built in primitive and chimerical Arya. The antiquity of the Vedic hymns has had to be much shortened, and, if we consent to read them without prejudice, we shall have little admiration for the authors, those gross Aryans, who tried to make their gods drunk in order to obtain cows, and who sacrificed and cut to pieces animals, and perhaps men, on their altars. There is surely room to suppose that their social condition was not more refined than their religion. On this point the information that may be drawn from the Vedic hymns is vague and drowned in the waves of religious effusion. Nevertheless the Rig-Veda speaks of spouses of the gods, and of princes surrounded by their wives, etc. In fact, a document much more precise and more recent, the Code of Manu, abundantly proves that the Hindoos, like all other peoples, have begun by being polygamous.
I do not now insist on this point, as I shall return to it later. In every country the primitive races have practised polygamy, when that has been possible for them. Our European ancestors have not been more scrupulous on this point than our hypothetical Aryan cousins of Central Asia. Cæsar tells us that the Gauls were polygamous, and had the right of life and death over their wives.[392] Tacitus vaunts much the monogamy of the Germans; this moral feature, says he, distinguishes them from other barbarians, but he confesses that certain German chiefs had several wives, and that, as it happens in all barbarous countries, the wife was sold by the parents for presents consisting of oxen, horses, and arms.[393]
Polygamy was so natural to German morals that, long after Tacitus, the Merovingian kings, Clotaire and his sons, for example, still practised it, that Dagobert had three wives, and that Charlemagne himself was bigamous. We know, too, that Saint Columban was banished from Gaul only for having blamed the polygamy of King Thierry. Let us resign ourselves, therefore, to confess the truth. The white race has no divine investiture. Like all the others, it has sprung from animality; like all the others, it has been polygamous, and we have only to open our eyes to perceive that, in the present day, in countries reputed to be the most civilised, and even in the classes reputed to be the most distinguished, the majority of individuals have polygamic instincts which they find it difficult to resist.
We are now in a position to form a just opinion of primitive polygamy. Its causes are manifold. The principal one is often the disproportion of the sexes, resulting from the enormous mortality of men which savage life necessitates. The desire of giving the rein to a sensuality that there is, as yet, no thought of repressing, may have a certain share in the matter; but this motive, which is perhaps dominant in the polygamous anthropoid apes, quickly becomes secondary in man.
Even the lowest savage is more calculating, and has more forethought, than the monkey. His first slave, one may say his first domestic animal, is his wife. Even when he is still a simple hunter and nomad, he has always game to be carried, fire to be lighted, a shelter to be erected, without reckoning that wives are very apt at gathering edible fruits and shell-fish, and rendering a thousand services. Besides, they give birth to offspring that can be bartered, sold, or even eaten at need.