He refreshes himself with them from the cares of government, and passes the night in their agreeable company.[1] We must not forget, besides, that, as the Mahabharata has informed us, the Kchatriyas practised marriage by capture and polygamy.[2]
To sum up, in India, as everywhere else, polygamy has evolved; it has at first been common; then, when power and riches have been concentrated in the hands of a small number, it has become the privilege of the great. The polygamy of the princes and of the rich Brahmins was even the first obstacle encountered in the seventeenth century by the preaching of the Jesuits in India.[3]
In the present time it is the same for the great, and custom tolerates a second wife, even to common husbands, in case of sterility of the first.[4] I shall have to speak again of these customs in treating of concubinage.
If we now sum up the general sense of the numerous facts which I have just passed in review, we see that with the entire human race polygamy has succeeded to the sexual and conjugal anarchy of the first ages. Like all other institutions, primitive polygamy has gradually become regulated, but always while keeping the woman in a very humiliating position. One fact of great importance, and which has by degrees ruined the régime of a plurality of wives, even when custom, law, and religion authorised it, is that polygamy became a luxury within the reach only of rulers, as soon as a tolerable social condition restrained the too rapid mortality of males. Indeed, from this moment the sexual equilibrium of births compelled the greater number of men to practical monogamy, and thenceforth, as Herbert Spencer justly remarks, a public opinion was necessarily formed in favour of monogamy. Often, therefore, polygamy constituted a legal privilege; it was expressly limited to kings, great men, and priests.
Besides this a hierarchy became established among the numerous wives, and one of them had precedence of her companions.
