So far as I am aware, no previous writer on the subject has emphasized the obligatory character of all these performances by widows.  To me that seems by far the most important aspect of the question, as it shows that the widows were not prompted to these actions by affectionate grief or self-sacrificing impulses, but by the command of the men; and if we bear in mind the superlative selfishness of these men we have no difficulty in comprehending that what makes them compel the women to do these penances is the desire to make them eager to care for the comfort and welfare of their husbands lest the latter die and they thus bring upon themselves the discomforts arid terrors of widowhood.

Martius justly remarks that the great dependance of savage women makes them eager to please their husbands (121); and this eagerness would naturally be doubled by making widowhood forbidding.  Bruhier wrote, in 1743, that in Corsica it was customary, in case a man died, for the women to fall upon his widow and give her a sound drubbing.  This custom, he adds significantly, “prompted the women to take good care of their husbands.”

It is true that the widowers also in some cases subjected themselves to penance; but usually they made it very much easier for themselves than for the widows.  In his Lettres sur le Congo (152) Edouard Dupont relates that a man who has lost his wife and wants to show grief shaves his head, blackens himself, stops work, and sits in front of his chimbeque several days.  His neighbors meanwhile feed him [no fasting for him!], and at last a friend brings him a calabash of malofar and tells him “stop mourning or you will die of starvation.”  “It does not happen often,” Dupont adds, “that the advice is not promptly followed.”

Selfish utilitarianism does not desert the savage even at the grave of his wife.  An amusing illustration of the shallowness of aboriginal grief where it seems “truly touching” may be found in an article by the Rev. F. McFarlane on British New Guinea.[125] Scene:  “A woman is being buried.  The husband is lying by the side of the grave, apparently in an agony of grief; he sobs and cries as if his heart would break.”  Then he jumps into the grave and whispers into the ears of the corpse—­what? a last farewell?  Oh, no!  “He is asking the spirit of his wife to go with him when he goes fishing, and make him successful also when he goes hunting, or goes to battle,” etc.; his last request being, “And please don’t be angry if I get another wife!”

The simple truth is that in their grief, as in everything else, savages are nothing but big children, crying one moment, laughing the next.  Whatever feelings they may have are shallow and without devotion.  If the widows of Mandans, Arawaks, Patagonians, etc., do not marry until a year after the death of their husband this is not on account of affectionate grief, but, as we have seen, because they are not allowed