126 VII. SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN THE FOREST 
distance from the village, the boring of the trees being 
expressly forbidden. Moreover, palm wine will not 
keep. Its existence makes it possible, therefore, for 
the people of a village to get drunk several times a year, 
on the occasions of their festivals, but it is not a con- 
tinual danger like the cheap spirits sold in the stores. 
Fresh palm wine tastes, when it is fermenting, very like 
the must of grape wine, and by itself it is not any more 
intoxicating than the latter ; but the natives are accus- 
tomed to put various species of bark into it, and then it 
can produce a terrible kind of drunkenness. 
Polygamy is another difficult social problem. We 
Europeans come here with our ideal of monogamy, and 
missionaries contend with all their resources against 
polygamy, in some places even urging the Government 
to suppress it by law. On the other hand, all of us here 
must allow that it is closely bound up with the existing 
economic and social conditions. Where the population 
lives in bamboo huts, and society is not so organised 
that a woman can earn her own living, there is no room 
for the unmarried woman, and if all women are to be 
married, polygamy is a necessary condition. Moreover, 
there are in the forest neither cows nor nanny goats, so 
that a mother must suckle her child for a long time if 
it is to be reared. Polygamy safeguards the claims of 
the child, for after its birth the woman has the right, 
and the duty, of living only for her child ; she is now no 
longer a wife, but only a mother, and she often spends 
the greater part of this time with her parents. At the 
end of three years comes the weaning, which is marked 
by a festival, and then she returns to her husband’s 
hut to be a wife once more. But this living for her child 
is not to be thought of unless the man has another wife. 
