Ch. Letourneau

“ Not that by his most glorious representatives, by those whom we call men of genius, man does not rise prodigiously above his distant relations of the mammal class; but, on the other hand, by imperfectly developed specimens he descends far below many species of animals; for if the idiot is only an exception, the man of genius is still more so. In fact, the lowest human races, with whose anatomy, psychology, and sociology we are to-day familiar, can only inspire us with feelings of modesty. They furnish studies in ethnography which have struck a mortal blow at the dreams of “the kingdom of man.” ”

“ Our conscience is still so impregnated with the morality of past ages that our public opinion and our juries willingly pardon a man who murders his adulterous wife, while they are full of mercy for the conjugal infidelities of this ferocious justiciary. The antique morals which hold woman as a servile property belonging to her husband still live in many minds. ”

“ This is the supreme truth of science, and it is only when such a point of view has become quite familiar to us that we shall be neither troubled nor disconcerted by the sociological history of humanity; and however shocking or unnatural certain customs may appear, we shall guard ourselves against any feeling of indignation at them, and more especially against a thoughtless refusal to give credence to them, simply because they run counter to our own usages and morality.
All that social science has a right to ask of the facts which it registers is that they should be authentic ”

“ Legal concubinage or the concubinate, admitted and practised, as we shall see, in so many countries, is a sort of free marriage, tolerated by custom, recognised by law, and co-existing by the side of monogamic marriage, the rigour of which it palliates. It was at first a blending of polygamy with monogamy, and then, undergoing itself an evolution analogous to that which has caused the adoption by degrees of legal monogamy among nearly all civilised peoples, it ended by becoming in its turn monogamic in ancient Rome. ”

“ Surely savage hordes and tribes naturally carry off the women and girls of their neighbours and enemies, the little groups with whom they are incessantly struggling for existence. They seize their women as they do everything else, and impose on the captives the unenviable rôle of slaves-of-all-work. Given the brutality of primitive man, the fate of the captured woman is necessarily of the hardest, and it is natural that the woman of the tribe should not solicit it. Thus, with or without reason, the Australian fells to the ground his captured wife, pierces her limbs with his javelin, etc. ”

“ We have seen adultery punished at first as a robbery—but a most execrable robbery—and the chastisement falling chiefly on the woman as being a property in revolt. For her alone fidelity is obligatory. As to the adulterous husband, he is punished, if at all, on the ground of having abused the property of another, and not in the least because he has been unfaithful to his own wife. By slow degrees, however, equity asserts certain rights, and at the same time customs are humanised; marriage becomes less and less a “contract of slavery” for the woman ”

“ Nothing can be more beautiful than the union of two intelligent and refined beings freely associating their lives after ripe reflection “for better, for worse,” as the marriage service of England has it. But the reality is often very different from this poetic ideal. Even amongst the most highly civilised peoples, this spontaneous, disinterested, devoted union, based on moral and intellectual sympathies, is very rare; it does not exist in civilisations still partly barbarous, whose monogamy easily accommodates itself to the subjection of women, however extreme. ”

“ In thousands of cases men of every period, every country, every race have conducted themselves in the same way, had the same ideas, realised the same inventions, adopted the same practices, without knowing each other, without even supposing the existence of the other peoples, and this simply because all of them were part of the great human family. But between the Mongoloids of North America, their cousins of Northern Asia, and the Hawaians, there is probably the bond of a distant and common origin, and, besides this, the nomad Mongols of Asia have more than once penetrated into India. ”

“ Now those of primitive man are quite as innocent, and the brutality of the savage has nothing in common with the moral retrogression of the civilised man struck with decay.
How unlike is the Aleout, imitating the sea-otter, without thinking any evil, to the European degraded by the vices of our civilisation! For the latter the future is closed; there are some declivities that can never be remounted. The posterity of the savage, on the contrary, may, with the aid of time and culture, attain to great moral elevation, for there are vital forces within him which are fresh and intact. ”

“ In fact, throughout the historic period the Greco-Roman world is patriarchal. In Greece and at Rome woman is despised, subjected, and possessed like a thing; while the power of the father of the family is enormous. It is especially so at Rome, where, nevertheless, the family is not yet strictly consanguineous, for it includes the wife, children, and slaves, and where agnation has for its basis the patria potestas. “All those are agnates who are under the same paternal power, or who have been, or who could be, if their ancestor had lived long enough to exercise his empire.... ”

“ In a society sufficiently numerous and savage it is no easy task for a man to guard his feminine property, for the women are not by any means averse to adventures. Their modesty is still very slight, and before belonging specially to one man they have generally been given or sold to many others. At that period of the social evolution public opinion saw no harm in all this. And, besides, the husband or the proprietor of the woman considered her absolutely as his thing, and did not scruple to lend her to his friends, to barter her, or to hire her out. ”

“ In regard to marriage, as well as to the family, nature has no preference; all means are welcome to her, provided the species profits by them, or, at least, does not suffer too much from them.
We find amongst animals temporary unions, at the close of which the male ceases absolutely to care for the female; but we also find, especially among birds, numbers of lasting unions, for which the word marriage is not too exalted. It does not appear that polyandry—that is, a durable society between one female and many males—has been practised by animals. ”

“ The first form of marriage, that of servitude of the man, who, instead of marrying, is married by the family of his wife, has fallen into desuetude in Malaya, but it has left behind it, in certain districts, the system of maternal filiation. It is the maternal uncle who is the head of the family, or, in default of him, the eldest son of the wife’s family. If there is neither uncle nor son old enough, it is the mother who becomes the head of the family, and the father only takes her place in case she has disappeared, and when all the children are minors. ”

“ I here end my short inquiry into the morals of primitive man and the eccentric modes of conjugal union which have preceded the institution of a more durable, exclusive, and solemn marriage.
We are filled with astonishment when we find such complete animal laxity in our undeveloped ancestors, and we can hardly understand the total absence of scruples which are now profoundly incarnate in us.
Those anthropologists who insist on making man a being apart in the universe shut their eyes to these gross aberrations. Evolutionists are not so timid, and do not fear to face the truth. ”

“ But in general the free union, or, what comes to the same thing, the power of divorce, left to the two united parties, is rare enough in countries more or less civilised. Most usually it is the husband who, even without any cause of adultery in the wife, has the right to repudiate her. It is thus, for example, at Madagascar, where, in order to repudiate his wife, a husband need simply declare his resolution to the magistrate who has received the notification of the marriage; it is only necessary for him to pay for the second time the hasina, or duty on marriage. ”