According to travellers’ statements, there are, indeed, peoples almost devoid of the feeling of jealousy, and the practice of lending or prostituting wives is generally taken as evidence of this. But jealousy, as well as love, is far from being the same feeling in the mind of a savage as in that of a civilized man. A wife is often regarded as not very different from other property, and an adulterer as a thief.[735] In some parts of Africa, he is punished as such, having his hands, or one of them, cut off.[736] The fact that a man lends his wife to a visitor no more implies the absence of jealousy than other ways of showing hospitality imply that he is without the proprietary feeling. According to Wilkes, the aborigines of New South Wales “will frequently give one of their wives to a friend who may be in want of one; but notwithstanding this laxity they are extremely jealous, and are very prompt to resent any freedom taken with their wives.”[737]
A married woman is never permitted to cohabit with any man but the husband, except with the husband’s permission; and this permission is given only as an act of hospitality or friendship, or as a means of profit. When we are told that a negro husband uses his wife for entrapping other men and making them pay a heavy fine;[738] that, among the Crees, adultery is considered no crime “provided the husband receives a valuable consideration for his wife’s prostitution;”[739] or that, in Nukahiva, husbands sometimes offer their wives to foreigners “from their ardent desire of possessing iron, or other European articles,”[740]—we must not infer from this profligacy that jealousy is unknown to man at early stages of civilization. On the contrary, such practices are due chiefly to contact with “higher culture,” which often has the effect of misleading natural instincts. “Husbands, after the degradation of a pseudo-civilization,” says Mr. Bonwick, “are sometimes found ready to barter the virtue of a wife for a piece of tobacco, a morsel of bread, or a silver sixpence.”[741] Mr. Curr observes that, among the Australian natives, “husbands display much less jealousy of white men than of those of their own colour,” and that they will more commonly prostitute their wives to strangers visiting the tribe than to their own people.[742] “Under no circumstances,” says Sir George Grey, “is a strange native allowed to approach the fire of a married man.”[743] According to Bosman, the Negroes of Benin were very jealous of their wives with their own countrymen, though not in the least with European foreigners;[744] and Lisiansky states exactly the same as regards the Sandwich Islanders.[745] In California, says Mr. Powers, “since the advent of the Americans the husband often traffics in his wife’s honour for gain, and even forces her to infamy when unwilling; though in early days he would have slain her without pity and without remorse for the same offence.”[746] The like is true of the Columbians about Puget Sound;[747] and Georgi remarks that the nomadic Koriaks torment their wives by their jealousy, sometimes even killing them from this passion; whereas those Koriaks who lead a stationary life, being far more advanced in civilization, are so little addicted to it, that they even have a relish for seeing foreigners make love to their wives, whom they dress accordingly.[748]
If the hypothesis of an annual pairing time in the infancy of mankind holds good, jealousy must at that stage have been a passion of very great intensity.
It may, however, be supposed that this feeling, though belonging to human nature, has been restrained by certain conditions which have made it necessary, or desirable, for a man to share his wife with other men. Thus polyandry now prevails in several parts of the world. But I shall endeavour to show, later on, that this practice is due chiefly to scarcity of women, and commonly implies an act of fraternal benevolence, the eldest and first married brother in a family giving his younger brothers a share in his wife, if they would otherwise be obliged to live unmarried. Hence polyandry can by no means, as Mr. McLennan suggests, be regarded as “a modification of and advance from promiscuity.” It owes its origin to causes, or a cause, which never would have produced general communism in women. Besides, it can be proved that polyandry is abhorrent to the rudest races of men.
It has been suggested, too, that man’s gregarious way of living made promiscuity necessary. The men of a group, it is said, must either have quarrelled about their women and separated, splitting the horde into hostile sections, or indulged in promiscuous intercourse. But it is hard to understand why tribal organization in olden times should have prevented a man having his special wife, since it does not do so among savages still existing. Primitive law is the law of might; and it is impossible to believe that the stronger men, who generally succeeded in getting the most comely women, voluntarily gave their weaker rivals a share in their precious capture. Regarding the aborigines of Queensland, Lumholtz states that as a rule, it is difficult for men to marry before they are thirty years of age, the old men having the youngest and best-looking wives, while a young man must consider himself fortunate if he can get an old woman.[749] It more commonly happens among savages, however, that almost every full-grown man is able to get a wife for himself; and when this is the case, there is still less reason for assuming communism in women.
It is not, of course, impossible that, among some peoples, intercourse between the sexes may have been almost promiscuous. But there is not a shred of genuine evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of promiscuity, instead of belonging, as Professor Giraud-Teulon thinks,[750] to the class of hypotheses which are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is essentially unscientific.
[CHAPTER VII]
MARRIAGE AND CELIBACY
With wild animals sexual desire is not less powerful as an incentive to strenuous exertion than hunger and thirst. In the rut-time, the males even of the most cowardly species engage in mortal combats; and abstinence, or at least voluntary abstinence, is almost unheard of in a state of nature.[751]
As regards savage and barbarous races of men, among whom the relations of the sexes under normal conditions take the form of marriage, nearly every individual strives to get married as soon as he, or she, reaches the age of puberty.[752] Hence there are far fewer bachelors and spinsters among them than among civilized peoples. Harmon found that among the Blackfeet, Crees, Chippewyans, and other aboriginal tribes on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, celibacy was a rare exception;[753] and Ashe noted the same fact among the Shawanese.[754] Prescott states of the Dacotahs, “I do not know of a bachelor among them. They have a little more respect for the women and themselves, than to live a single life.”[755] Indeed, according to Adair, many Indian women thought virginity and widowhood the same as death.[756] Among the Eastern Greenlanders, visited by Lieutenant Holm, only one unmarried woman was met with.[757]