uses up the men to such a degree that often, in spite of the custom of female infanticide, there is still an excess of women sufficient to impose polygamy. Although primitive morality may not think in the least of blaming the plurality of wives, it yet happens that this polygamy, to which all men aspire in a savage country, is spontaneously restricted; and, as with chimpanzees, and for the same reasons, it becomes, in fact, the privilege of a small number of the strongest and the most feared, the chiefs, the sorcerers, or the priests, when there are any.
In Australia, for example, the adult men take possession of the women of all ages, and in consequence the greater number of young men cannot become proprietors of a woman before the age of about thirty years.[1]
Enforced celibacy is, besides, softened by the complaisance of the men already provided for, the husbands, if we may so call them, who are generous to the other men, and much more jealous of their rights of property than of their conjugal rights. It is easy to have an understanding with them, and, with the aid of a suitable present, to induce them to lend their wives. In New Caledonia the chiefs and rich men only can indulge in the luxury of polygamy, and in this archipelago the plurality of wives has already the character that it nearly always assumes in a primitive country. If the New Caledonians ardently desire to have several wives it is not generally with a sensual aim, for among the Canaks the genetic appetite is little developed; their reasons are of quite another kind. Neither slavery nor domesticity yet exist in New Caledonia. However, agriculture is already practised there, and this requires hard labour, from which the men, especially the chief men, like to exonerate themselves. Now, it is polygamy that furnishes the Canaks with servile labour, which they cannot do without; it exactly replaces slavery. Therefore, every man, of however little importance he may be, procures a number of women in proportion to the extent of the land he has in cultivation, and also to the figure he must make in the world. We shall find this servile polygamy in many other countries, notably among the Fijians, who resemble the New Caledonians, but at Fiji polygamy had already
- ↑ Baudin, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xviii. p. 34.
