Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/183

 he tries to raise a lesser wife to the supreme rank. The legal concubines, the lesser wives, are subordinate to the especially legitimate wife, and are forbidden to assume the dress reserved for her. The chief wife is the mistress of the house; she is not only the mother of her own children, but also the putative mother of the children of the lesser wives. The latter children wear mourning for her and not for their natural mother; and it is on the legal mother that they lavish the expressions of their respect, affection, and obedience. We learn from Chinese comedies that rivalries sometimes break out between the matron and her fellow wives; but in general the Chinese woman is so well trained, so well broken in from infancy, that this is rare enough, and Chinese wives have even been known to counsel their husbands to take concubines in the towns where they may be long detained by business. It is well to remember, by the way, that the human brain can retain all kinds of impressions, and that morality and instincts strictly result from the nature of the life and education.

The concubinate must actually have been necessary for man, for we see it practised by all races, and by the white races as well as the others.

We know that the monarchs of ancient Assyria had, by the side of the single wife, a good number of concubines, exactly like the Abyssinian negroes of our own days, or, to keep to antiquity, like the glorious Solomon.

Polygamous as they are, the modern Arabs do not on that account abstain from the concubinate. Even at Mecca all the rich men keep in their houses, with their legitimate wives, concubines who are generally natives of Abyssinia. However, if one of these women becomes a mother, the morality of the country requires her master to raise her to the rank of legitimate wife. The Mekavy of the middle and lower class also buy young Abyssinian slaves, teach them to cook and to sew, make concubines of them, and re-sell them afterwards advantageously to passing strangers,