Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/75

 enforced chastity imposed on women under the most terrible penalties. In reality, primitive marriage hardly merits the name; it is simply the taking possession of one or several women by one man, who holds them by the same title as all other property, and who treats adultery, when unauthorised by himself, strictly as robbery. This ferocious restraint has resulted, especially in the woman, in the formation of particular mental impressions, corresponding psychically to the sentiment of modesty, and inducing a certain sexual reserve which has become instinctive. But this moral inhibition is still very weak in races of low development, and, taking the whole human species, it exists chiefly in the woman; it is a sexual peculiarity of character, and is of relatively recent origin.

If we keep well in mind these preliminary considerations, we shall not be much surprised at the forms of sexual association which we are about to consider, although they are singularly repulsive to our ideas of morality. We shall be still less surprised at them when we are acquainted with the extreme licence permitted in many savage and barbarous societies.

There is nothing more difficult for us to realise, civilised as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation as regards what we call par excellence "morality." It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, we cannot help attaching a certain shame, do not in the least shock the still imperfect conscience of the primitive man. On this point facts are eloquent and abundant; I will quote a few of them.

In Tasmania it way thought an honour for women to prostitute themselves to Europeans, who were ennobled in the eyes of the natives by the prestige of their superiority. The Australians, who were a little more developed than the Tasmanians, willingly lent or hired out their women—at least those that were their own property—to their friends.