Apart from these home comforts there are selfish reasons enough why savages should take the trouble to protect their wives and rear children.  In Australia it is a universal custom to exchange a daughter for a new wife, discarding or neglecting the old one; and the habit of treating children as merchandise prevails in various other parts of the world.  The gross utilitarianism of South African marriages is illustrated in Dr. Fritsch’s remarks on the Ama-Zulus.  “As these women too are slaves, there is not much to say about love, marriage, or conjugal life,” he says.  The husband pays for his wife, but expects her to repay him for his outlay by hard work and by bearing children whom he can sell.  “If she fails to make herself thus useful, if she falls ill, becomes weak, or remains childless, he often sends her back to her father and demands restitution of the cattle he had paid for her;” and his demand has to be complied with.  Lord Randolph Churchill (249) was informed by a native of Mashonaland that he had his eye on a girl whom he desired to marry, because “if he was lucky, his wife might have daughters whom he would be able to sell in exchange for goats.”  Samuel Baker writes in one of his books of African exploration (Ism., 341): 

“Girls are always purchased if required as wives.  It would be quite impossible to obtain a wife for love from any tribe that I have visited.  ’Blessed is he that hath his quiver full of them’ (daughters).  A large family of girls is a source of wealth to the father, as he sells each daughter for twelve or fifteen cows to her suitor.”

Of the Central African, Macdonald says (I., 141): 

“The more wives he has the richer he is.  It is his wives that maintain him.  They do all his ploughing, milling, cooking, etc.  They may be viewed as superior servants, who combine all the capacities of male servants and female servants in Britain—­who do all his work and ask no wages.”

We need not assume a problematic affection to explain why such a man marries.

But the savage’s principal marriage motive is, of course, sensualism.  If he wants to own a particular girl he must take care of her.  If he tires of her it is easy enough to get rid of her or to make her a drudge pure and simple, while her successor enjoys his caresses.  Speaking of Pennsylvania Indians, Buchanan remarks naively (II., 95) that “the wives are the true servants of their husbands; otherwise the men are very affectionate to them.”  On another page (102) he inadvertently explains what he means by this paradox:  “the ancient women are used for cooks, barbers, and other services, the younger for dalliance.”  In other words, Buchanan makes the common mistake of applying the altruistic word affection to what is nothing more than selfish indulgence of the sensual appetite.  So does Pajeken when he tells us in the Ausland about the “touching tenderness” of a Crow chief toward a fourteen-year-old girl whom he had just added to the number of his wives.