Very often the assimilation of the Kabyle people to the French is spoken of as a thing relatively easy. It appears to me that the servile subjection of the Kabyle woman is an almost insurmountable obstacle to this dream of fusion. Without doubt the married woman in France is only a minor; but in Kabyle she is still in the lowest stage of slavery. In this respect the Berbers of Kabyle are on a level with the coarsest savages; they are even inferior to the Arabs, although the latter have preserved almost unchanged the polygamic régime of the old Islamite, and even pre-Islamite ages. But in all times and all countries the condition of woman is the measure of the moral development of the whole people. Now, in regard to this there is a gulf between Kabyle and civilised Europe. The polygamic régime has, besides, in every country an almost necessary result—the slavery of women. This is natural. As in the hordes of chimpanzees, the male, the anthropomorphous paterfamilias, only maintains his authority by force and by expelling his rivals, so, in human societies, the polygamous husband can hardly be anything but the proprietor of subjugated beings, not daring to aspire to freedom. It may be remarked also that the polygamic appetite, so habitual to man, cannot be strange to woman. Both have the same blood and share the same heredity. The polygamous husband, therefore, has always to prevent or repress the straying of his feminine flock by close confinement or by terror. Under a polygamic régime the wife has scarcely any rights; she has chiefly duties. III. Polygamy in Egypt, Mexico, and Peru.
I have dwelt long enough on Mussulman polygamy. From a sociological point of view it is extremely interesting. It affords us the opportunity of studying from life customs which, with differences of detail, must have been those of all civilised peoples at a certain period of their evolution, and which probably have only been kept up among the Islamites on account of the confusion of civil and religious laws, these last giving to polygamy a sort of consecration.
In all the great primitive barbarous monarchies the
