take away the wife or the daughter of a free man to make her his own wife, shall be imprisoned for the usual time and put to death by strangulation."[1]
In Japan the law gives the offended husband the cruel and very general right to kill the guilty ones if taken in adultery, and forbids him to spare one.[2] We find this latter injunction, perhaps more humane than it appears, in ancient Roman legislation and elsewhere.
Nothing is at once more monotonous and more ghastly than this ethnographic review of the penalties against adultery.
Simple death has not sufficed to punish this crime, so enormous has it everywhere seemed; and thus other refinements of cruelty have been added—disembowelling, cutting in pieces, the stake, etc.
So far, among the races we have been investigating, Chinese legislation has been the wisest and most just, since, contrary to usual custom, it enacts the most severe penalties against the powerful man who takes advantage of his social position to commit adultery. Here and there, however, we find societies where adultery excites less fury. These societies are rare, and they are not always the most civilised.
At Java, for example, adultery is treated with clemency, especially if it is not committed with the chief wife. Even in this last case the guilty one, at least the man, is often only punished by public contempt.[3] The Dyaks punish conjugal infidelity with a fine only, for both parties.[4] This is a rare example of clemency, and it is given by a still barbarous race. We look in vain for such moderation among much more civilised peoples, as we shall see in studying ancient Egypt and the Berbers and Semites.
