Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/178

 refined debauchery is taught ex professo; that they use love-charms, etc. I stop here, and purposely abstain from speaking of the prostitution of Europe. We know too well that it has always been very flourishing, as well in ancient Rome as in the Middle Ages, although they were so catholic. In old France it established itself boldly, in full daylight, to such a degree that some towns, that of Rouen for example, had their proxénètes jurés, wearing bronze medals with the arms of the town on them. As for contemporary prostitution, it is superfluous to call attention to the fact that it is one of our great social diseases. To sum up, the origin of prostitution goes back to the most primitive societies; it is anterior to all the forms of marriage, and it has persisted down to our own day in every country, and whatever might be the race, religion, form of government, or conjugal régime prevailing. Taken by itself, it would suffice to prove that monogamy is a type of marriage to which mankind has found it very difficult to bend itself; the very general existence of the concubinate completes the demonstration. III. Various Forms of Concubinage.

Between animal love, that can be tasted with the prostitute, and the noblest monogamic union, there is a wide space, which the concubinate has filled. 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. I will briefly retrace its ethnographical history.

In its primitive phase, still very confused, the concubinate has been simply the conjugal appropriation of slaves,