Page:Walter Matthew Gallichan - Women under Polygamy (1914).djvu/100

 is a high scarcity value in sex in the West. This is almost unknown in the East, where everyone is enjoined to marry. If one wife in the harem is fractious and unmanageable, there are three others who may be amiable and amenable. There is no strong incentive to wander. Besides, has not a rajah a troupe of dancing girls and slaves as well? All of these dependents are at his command.

The Eastern servant has no higher ambition than to become an ikbal, or favourite, of her master. She ceases then to be a serf; she has a status, rights, and property of her own. When she bears a child, she is for ever a free woman. She can enforce her master to maintain her and the children. If she becomes a wife, and the husband desires to disavow her, he is bound to make her a substantial allowance for life.

Divorce may be easy, but responsibility does not end with mere repudiation of a wife. It is a tax upon a rajah's income when he has to support a number of divorced wives and their families. Therefore, though total separation is apparently facile under polygamy, it is not quite so simple as it seems at first glance.

In a case of dissolution of marriage, a man must prove that his wife has been guilty of one or more of the following offences: Adultery, disobedience, bad temper. Ill health is a cause for divorce, and so is barrenness. If a woman gives birth only to female