578 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of great position whose heroic deeds and winning manners made 

 them adored by women of their own race, should have spoiled their 

 prime, or inextricably entangled themselves, or wrecked their own 

 roof -tree and incurred lifelong desertion by the wife of their youth. 

 The bluest blood of Spain was not contaminated by an alliance with 

 the Incas, but just ten years ago the direct line of an ancient English 

 earldom was extinguished among the Kaffirs. The truth seems to 

 be that while a woman will not as a rule accept a man who is her 

 inferior in rank or refinement, a man easily contents himself for the 

 time with almost any female. The Bantu woman and the Australian 

 zubra are not alluring, but they have never lacked suitors. Colonial 

 women shrink (or profess to shrink) from the Chinaman; all colors — ■ 

 black, brown, red, and yellow — seem to be alike to the undiscriminat- 

 ing male appetite. Yet it has its preferences. The high official who 

 stands unmoved before the cloudy attractions of the Zulu, surrenders 

 at discretion to the soft-voiced, dark-eyed, plump-limbed daughters of 

 Maoriland. In the last case a perverse theory (of the future amal- 

 gamation of the races) may have been " the light that led astray " ; 

 it certainly was used to justify their acts to the consciences of the 

 doers. Romance had its share: Browning's Waring (who was pre- 

 mier as well as poet) threw a poetic glamour over the miscegena- 

 tion, as another hiinister found in the race the Ossianesque attributes 

 of his own Highlanders. It sometimes, even now, rises into passion : 

 the colonial schoolmaster who marries a native girl will declare that 

 his is a love match. But the chief reason at all times was " the 

 custom of the country." " It was the regular thing," remarked an 

 old legislator, looking ruefully back on his past. Nor is it to be 

 harshly censured. Corresponding to the Roman slave-concubinage 

 which Cato Major did not disdain to practice, it repeated a stage in 

 the history of the mother country when the invading Angles allied 

 themselves (as anthropology abundantly proves) with the native 

 Britons. While making a kind of atonement to the indigenes, it was 

 a solatium to the pioneer colonists for a life of hardship and privation. 

 A higher grade was the concubinage of convictism, which was 

 with women of the same race and was capable of rising into normal 

 marriage. In the early days of New South Wales and Van Diemen's 

 Land it seems to have been almost universal, and it lasted for many 

 years. Not one in ten of the officials lived with his legally married 

 wife. In the latter colony it was suppressed by the governor, who 

 ordered them to marry the women by whom they had families. In 

 the former, if Dr. Lang's account of his exertions is accepted, it was 

 put down by the exposure of guilty parties. It was accompanied by 

 other features of a low social state. The public and private sale of 

 wives was not infrequent. The colonial equivalent for a wife, in the 



