composition with the seducer.[1] He can at will either pardon—as did a Mandan husband who sent the wife to her lover, adding three horses to the present[2]—or he can put to death the faithless wife and her accomplice. By a rare exception, the Omahas recognised the right of the wife to revenge herself on an adulterous husband and his mistress.[3] With the Omahas, also, an adulterous wife was bound to a stake in the prairie, abused by twenty or thirty men, and then abandoned by her husband.[4] We have seen that this obscene mode of retaliation is in use at New Caledonia, and we shall find it again in the Roman Empire. The mode of vengeance with the Redskins, whether of the husband or the tribe, varied according to locality, but was often atrocious. Thus the Modocs of California publicly disembowelled the guilty woman.[5] Among the Hoopsas, another tribe of Californian Redskins, the male accomplice in the adultery lost one eye,[6] or, if he was married, the injured man took his wife.
The natives of South America were not more clement than their congeners in the north. The Caribees put both guilty ones to death.[7] The Guarayos also punished with death the accomplice in adultery as if he were a thief.[8]
From this rapid survey of savage countries we may conclude that adultery is everywhere considered as a robbery only, but at the same time as one of the gravest of robberies. The man who is guilty of adultery suffers consequently, by virtue of the right of retaliation, a punishment more or less severe. As for the adulterous woman, she is generally chastised by the husband-proprietor with extreme cruelty, no restraint existing to moderate his vengeance.
VI. Adultery in Barbarous America.
In the barbarous monarchies of all countries the chastisement of adultery is scarcely mitigated, and for a long time
- ↑ J. O. Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, p. 364, Smithsonian Institution, 1885.
- ↑ Wake, vol. i. p. 428.
- ↑ J. O. Dorsey, loc. cit.
- ↑ Id., ibid.
- ↑ Bancroft, Native Races, etc., vol. i. p. 350.
- ↑ Id., ibid. p. 412.
- ↑ Voyage à la Terre-ferme, etc., t. I^{er.} p. 304.
- ↑ D'Orbigny, L'homme Américain, t. ii. p. 329.
