Page:Annie Besant, Marriage A Plea for Reform, second edition 1882.djvu/11

 a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldst have her to thy wife," he might take her home, and become her husband, "and she shall be thy wife" (Deut. xxi. 10-14). After the destruction of Benjamin, as related in Judges xx., it was arranged that the survivors should possess themselves of women as wives by force and fraud: "Lie in wait in the vineyards, and see and behold if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife.... . And the children of Benjamin did so, and took their wives according to their number, of them that danced, whom they caught" (Judges xxi. 20, 21, 23). The same plan was adopted by the Romans in their earliest days, when they needed wives. Romulus invited the people of the Sabines and the neighbouring towns to see some public games, and in the midst of the show the Romans rushed in and carried off all the marriageable maidens they could lay hands on (Liddell's "History of Rome," p. 20). These instances may be objected to as legendary, but they are faithful pictures of the rough wooing of early times. Among some barbarous nations the winning of a bride is still harsher: the bridegroom rushes into the father's house knocks the maiden down, picks up her senseless body, flings it over his shoulder, and runs for his life; he is pursued by the youth of the village, pelted with stones, sticks, &c., and has to win his wife by sheer strength and swiftness. In some tribes this is a mere marriage ceremony, a survival from the time when the fight was a real one, and amongst ourselves the slipper thrown after the departing bridegroom and bride is a direct descendant of the heavier missiles thrown with deadly intent thousands of years ago by our remote ancestors. Amongst many semi-barbarous nations the wives are still bought; in some parts of Africa the wooer pays a certain number of cows for his bride; in other places, money or goods are given in exchange. The point to be noted is that the wife is literally taken by force, or bought; she is not free to choose her husband; she does not give herself to him; she is a piece of property, handed over by her original owner—her father—to her new owner—her husband—in exchange for certain solid money or money's worth; hence she becomes the property of the man who has paid for her.

In an admirable article in the Westminster Review for April, 1876, the following striking passage is to be found: