"Where are real monogamists to be found?" asked Schopenhauer in his essay, "Ueber die Weibe." And James Hinton was wont to ask: "What is the meaning of maintaining monogamy? Is there any chance of getting it, I should like to know? Do you call English life monogamous?"
"Almost everywhere," says Westermarck of polygyny (which he discusses fully in Chs. XX-XXII of his History of Human Marriage) "it is confined to the smaller part of the people, the vast majority being monogamous." Maurice Gregory (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1906) gives statistics showing that nearly everywhere the tendency is towards equality in number of the sexes.
In a polygamous land a man is of course as much bound by his obligations to his second wife as to his first. Among ourselves the man's "second wife" is degraded with the name of "mistress," and the worse he treats her and her children the more his "morality" is approved, just as the Catholic Church, when struggling to establish sacerdotal celibacy, approved more highly the priest who had illegitimate relations with women than the priest who decently and openly married. If his neglect induces a married man's mistress to make known her relationship to him the man is justified in prosecuting her, and his counsel, assured of general sympathy, will state in court that "this woman has even been so wicked as to write to the prosecutor's wife!"