These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardness of heart"—sensual, selfish indulgence—that smothers the parental instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring. In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings. But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on that there are other things in which animals are superior not only to savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.
HONORABLE POLYGAMY
Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find further interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow. The monogamous sentiment—the feeling that a man and his wife belong to each other exclusively—is now so strong that a person who commits bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprison him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable people will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to make polygamy a feature of their religion, but in 1882 Congress passed a law suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamous sentiment exist "always and everywhere?"
Livingstone relates (M.S.A., I., 306-312) that the King of the Beetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor had only one wife:
"When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country, people could not marry until they were of a mature age, and then could never have more than one wife, he said it was perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could submit voluntarily to such laws."
He himself had five wives and one of these queens
"remarked very judiciously that such laws as ours would not suit the Beetjuans because there were so great a number of women and the male population suffered such diminutions from the wars."
Sir Samuel Baker (A.N., 147) says of the wife of the Chief of
Latooka:
"She asked many questions, how many wives I had? and was
astonished to hear that I was contented with one. This
amused her immensely, and she laughed heartily with her
daughter at the idea."
In Equatorial Africa, "if a man marries and his wife thinks that he can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again, and calls him a stingy fellow if he declines to do so" (Reade, 259). Livingstone (N.E.Z., 284) says of the Makalolo women: