[219] Histoire des Variations, liv. iv. “L’Evangile n’a ni révoqué ni défendu ce qui avait été permis dans la loi de Moïse à l’égard du mariage: Jesus Christ n’a pas changé la police extérieure, mais il a ajouté seulement la justice et la vie éternelle pour récompense.” So, in 1539, the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, wishing to marry a second wife while the first was alive, was permitted to “commit bigamy” by the eminent reformers, M. Luther, Kuhorn (M. Bucer), Melancthon, and others, with the sole condition of secrecy. In the present age, the Right Rev. J. W. Colenso, D.D. and Bishop of Natal, “not only tolerates polygamy in converts, but defends it on the ground of religion and humanity.”
POLYGAMY.The “chaste and plural marriage,” being once legalized, finds a multitude of supporters. The anti-Mormons declare that it is at once fornication and adultery—a sin which absorbs all others. The Mormons point triumphantly to the austere morals of their community, their superior freedom from maladive influences, and the absence of that uncleanness and licentiousness which distinguish the cities of the civilized world. They boast that, if it be an evil, they have at least chosen the lesser evil; that they practice openly as a virtue what others do secretly as a sin—how full is society of these latent Mormons!—that their plurality has abolished the necessity of concubinage, cryptogamy, contubernium, celibacy, mariages du treizième arrondissement, with their terrible consequences, infanticide, and so forth; that they have removed their ways from those “whose end is bitter as wormwood, and sharp as a two-edged sword.” Like its sister institution Slavery, the birth and growth of a similar age, Polygamy acquires vim by abuse and detraction: the more turpitude is heaped upon it, the brighter and more glorious it appears to its votaries.
There are rules and regulations of Mormonism—I can not say whether they date before or after the heavenly command to pluralize—which disprove the popular statement that such marriages are made to gratify licentiousness, and which render polygamy a positive necessity. All sensuality in the married state is strictly forbidden beyond the requisite for insuring progeny—the practice, in fact, of Adam and Abraham. During the gestation and nursing of children, the strictest continence on the part of the mother is required—rather for a hygienic than for a religious reason. The same custom is practiced in part by the Jews, and in whole by some of the noblest tribes of savages; the splendid physical development of the Kaffir race in South Africa is attributed by some authors to a rule of continence like that of the Mormons, and to a lactation prolonged for two years. The anomaly of such a practice in the midst of civilization is worthy of a place in De Balzac’s great repertory of morbid anatomy: it is only to be equaled by the exceptional nature of the Mormon’s position, his past fate and his future prospects. Spartan-like, the Faith wants a race of warriors, and it adopts the best means to obtain them.
Besides religious and physiological, there are social motives for the plurality. As in the days of Abraham, the lands about New Jordan are broad and the people few. Of the three forms that unite the sexes, polygamy increases, while monogamy balances, and polyandry diminishes progeny. The former, as Montesquieu acutely suggested, acts inversely to the latter by causing a preponderance of female over male births: “Un fait important à noter,” says M. Remy, “c’est qu’il y a en Utah beaucoup plus de naissances de filles que de garçons, resultat opposé à ce qu’on observe dans tous les pays où la monogamie est pratiquée, et parfaitement conforme à ce qu’on a remarqué chez les polygames Mussulmans.” M. Remy’s statement is as distinctly affirmed by Mr. Hyde, the Mormon apostate. In the East, where the census is unknown, we can judge of the relative proportions of the sexes only by the families of the great and wealthy, who invariably practice polygamy, and we find the number of daughters mostly superior to that of sons, except where female infanticide deludes the public into judging otherwise. In lands where polyandry is the rule, for instance, in the Junsar and Bawur pergunnahs of the Dhun, there is a striking discrepancy in the proportions of the sexes among young children as well as adults: thus, in a village where 400 boys are found, there will be 120 girls; and, on the other hand, in the Gurhwal Hills, where polygamy is prevalent, there is a surplus of female children. The experienced East Indian official who has published this statement[220] is “inclined to give more weight to nature’s adaptability to national habit than to the possibility of infanticide,” for which there are no reasons. If these be facts, Nature then has made provision for polygamy and polyandry: our plastic mother has prepared her children to practice them all. Even in Scotland modern statists have observed that the proportion of boys born to girls is greater in the rural districts; and, attributing the phenomenon to the physical weakening of the parents, have considered it a rule so established as to “afford a valuable hint to those who desire male progeny.” The anti-Mormons are fond of quoting Paley: “It is not the question whether one man will have more children by five wives, but whether these five women would not have had more children if they had each a husband.” The Mormons reply that—setting aside the altered rule of production—their colony, unlike all others, numbers more female than male immigrants; consequently that, without polygamy, part of the social field would remain untilled.[221]
[220] Hunting in the Himalaya, by R. H. W. Dunlop, C.B., B.C.S., F.R.G.S., London, Richard Bentley, 1860.
[221] I am sure of the correctness of this assertion, which is thus denied in general terms by M. Reclus, of the Revue des Deux-Mondes. “A la fin de 1858, on comptaît sur le Territoire 3617 maris polygames, dont 1117 ayant cinque femmes ou d’avantage: mais un grand nombre de Mormons n’avaient encore pu trouver d’épouses; il est probable même que le chiffre des hommes depasse celui des femmes, comme dans tous les pays peuplés d’emigrans. L’équilibre entre les sexes n’est pas encore établi.”
To the unprejudiced traveler it appears that polygamy is the rule where population is required, and where the great social evil has not had time to develop itself. In Paris or London the institution would, like slavery, die a natural death; in Arabia and in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains it maintains a strong hold upon the affections of mankind. Monogamy is best fitted for the large, wealthy, and flourishing communities in which man is rarely the happier because his quiver is full of children, and where the Hetæra becomes the succedaneum of the “plurality-wife.” Polyandry has been practiced principally by priestly and barbarous tribes,[222] who fear most for the increase of their numbers, which would end by driving them to honest industry. It reappears in a remarkable manner in the highest state of social civilization, where excessive expenditure is an obstacle to freehold property, and the practice is probably on the increase.
[222] The Mahabharata thus relates the origin of the practice in India. The five princely Pandava brothers, when contending for a prize offered by the King of Drona to the most successful archer, agreed to divide it if any of them should prove the winner. Arjun, the eldest, was declared victor, and received in gift Draupadi, the king’s daughter, who thus became the joint-stock property of the whole fraternity. They lived en famille for some years at the foot of Bairath, the remains of which, or rather a Ghoorka structure on the same site, are still visible on a hill near the N.W. corner of the Dhun. (Hunting in the Himalaya, chap. vii.)
The other motive for polygamy in Utah is economy. Servants are rare and costly; it is cheaper and more comfortable to marry them. Many converts are attracted by the prospect of becoming wives, especially from places where, like Clifton, there are sixty-four females to thirty-six males. The old maid is, as she ought to be, an unknown entity. Life in the wilds of Western America is a course of severe toil: a single woman can not perform the manifold duties of housekeeping, cooking, scrubbing, washing, darning, child-bearing, and nursing a family. A division of labor is necessary, and she finds it by acquiring a sisterhood. Throughout the States, whenever a woman is seen at manual or outdoor work, one is certain that she is Irish, German, or Scandinavian. The delicacy and fragility of the Anglo-American female nature is at once the cause and the effect of this exemption from toil.
MORMON WOMEN.—POLYGAMY.The moral influence diffused over social relations by the presence of polygyny will be intelligible only to those who have studied the workings of the system in lands where seclusion is practiced in its modified form, as among the Syrian Christians. In America society splits into two parts—man and woman—even more readily than in England; each sex is freer and happier in the company of its congeners. At Great Salt Lake City there is a gloom like that which the late Professor H. H. Wilson described as being cast by the invading Moslem over the innocent gayety of the primitive Hindoo. The choice egotism of the heart called Love—that is to say, the propensity elevated by sentiment, and not undirected by reason, subsides into a calm and unimpassioned domestic attachment: romance and reverence are transferred, with the true Mormon concentration, from love and liberty to religion and the Church. The consent of the first wife to a rival is seldom refused, and a ménage à trois, in the Mormon sense of the phrase, is fatal to the development of that tender tie which must be confined to two. In its stead there is household comfort, affection, circumspect friendship, and domestic discipline. Womanhood is not petted and spoiled as in the Eastern States; the inevitable cyclical revolution, indeed, has rather placed her below par, where, however, I believe her to be happier than when set upon an uncomfortable and unnatural eminence.