38 DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS: 



fired and his cattle driven off. What right has he to lay a limit to the 

 hunting grounds, or to spoil the wild free life of the plains with his dirty 

 agriculture ? 



As to the marriage relation and its attendant moralities, the forms are 

 numerous and notorious enough. Public opinion seems to have varied 

 through all phases and ideals, and yet there is no indication of finality. 

 Late investigations show that at an early period in all human societies the 

 marriage tie is very promiscuous the relation of brother and sister in this 

 respect being rather the rule than the exception ; in the present day such 

 a bond as the last-mentioned would be considered inhuman and mon- 

 strous. ' Polyandry prevails among one people or at one time, polygyny 

 prevails among another people or at another time. In Central Africa to- 

 day the chief offers you his wife as a mark of hospitality, in India the 

 native Prince keeps her hidden even from his most intimate guest. 

 Among the Japanese, public opinion holds young women even of good 

 birth singularly free in their intercourse with men, till they are married ; 

 at Paris they are free after. In the Greek and Roman antiquity marriage 

 seems with some brilliant exceptions to have been a prosaic affair mostly 

 a matter of convenience and housekeeping the woman an underling 

 little of the ideal attaching to the relationship of man and wife. The 

 romance of love went elsewhere. The better class of free women or 

 Hetairai were those who gave a spiritual charm to the passion. They 

 were an educated and recognised body, and possibly in their best times 

 exercised a healthy and discriminating influence upon the male youth. 

 The respectful treatment of Theodota by Socrates, and the advice which 

 he gives her concerning her lovers : to keep the insolent from her door,, 

 and to rejoice greatly when the accepted succeed in anything honorable, 

 indicates this. That their influence was at times immense the mere name 

 of Aspasia is sufficient to show ; and if Plato in the Symposium reports 

 correctly the words of Diotima, her teaching on the subject of human and 

 divine love was probably of the noblest and profoundest that has ever been 

 given to the world. 



With the influx of the North-men over Europe came a new ideal of 

 the sexual relation, and the wife mounted more into equality with her 

 husband than before. The romance of love, however, still went mainly 

 outside marriage, and may I believe be traced in two chief forms that 

 of Chivalry, as an ideal devotion to pure Womanhood ; and that of Min- 

 strelsy, which took quite a different hue, individual and sentimental the 

 lover and his mistress (she as often as not the wife of another), the seren- 



Yet there is no doubt that lasting and passionate love may exist between two persons 

 thus nearly related. The danger to the health of the offspring from occasional in-breed- 

 ing of the kind appears to arise chiefly from the accentuation of infirmities common to the 

 two parents. In a state of society free from the diseases of the civilisation-period, such a 

 danger would be greatly reduced and this may partly serve to explain the extensive 

 admission of this custom in savagery. 



