242 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



and in varying degrees of civilisation from the lowest 

 savagery upwards. Nor are they breaches of the 

 traditional code of morals : on the contrary, they are 

 its embodiment and expression. By them not merely 

 are unmarried women free to dispose of their persons ; 

 married women bestow their favours at the instance, or 

 with the consent, of their husbands, or else in obedience 

 to some religious or social duty, upon strange men 

 and at times upon men whom they are required in 

 ordinary circumstances to shun under the severest 

 penalties of the tribal religion, penalties not the 

 sanction of a merely conjugal duty but of the wider 

 social organisation. Even when their favours cannot 

 be brought within any of these categories, when they 

 are bestowed without the knowledge or concurrence of 

 their husbands the transgression is frequently of small 

 account. It is winked at, or it is deemed no more 

 than a petty theft for which the husband is willing to 

 be placated by payment of compensation, in many 

 cases trifling in amount or according to a fixed tariff, 

 or else by the castigation of the erring wife or the 

 partner of her guilt. 1 



The view thus implied of what we should call 

 serious offences against virtue is not, it is true, uni- 

 versal. But it is common enough and distributed 

 widely enough to lead the student seriously to ask 



i In Northern Queensland, where the husband enjoys the 

 common rights of lending exchanging selling or divorcing his wife, 

 while she has no corresponding powers, there seem to be curious 

 divergencies in the way in which rape of a married woman is 

 regarded. In some places the culprit exposes himself to death, or 

 to a severe punishment short of death ; elsewhere, a comparatively few 

 miles off, the woman's husband or betrothed may not eren consider 

 himself aggrieved (Roth, Bull. viii. 6 (s. 2), 9 (s. 10). 



