Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the men to compel their wives to follow them into death.  But the most widely accepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when he declared regarding the Wends that

“they preserve their conjugal love with such ardent zeal that the wife refuses to survive her husband; and she is especially admired among women who takes her own life in order to be burnt on the same pile with her master.”

This view is the fourth of the mistakes I have undertaken to demolish in this chapter.

In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in question hold in regard to a future world.  It is supposed that a warrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; for which reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons are placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to be useful to him in his new existence.  His principal servant and provider of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is expected to follow him.

This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not the whole truth.  To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we must realize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men, extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to a cruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow them because of the promptings of affection, but either under physical compulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral reprobation and social persecution which made death preferable to life.  In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed against their will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and being buried alive,

“the wife or servant who preferred life to the act of martyrdom, which was to attest their fidelity, was an object of general contempt, and devoted or doomed to a life worse than death.”

The consequence of this was that

“generally the wives and servants offered themselves voluntarily, and there are even instances of wives who preferred suicide to prove their conjugal devotion when they were prevented from descending to the grave with the body of their consort.” (Rivero and Tschudi, 186.)

Usually, too, superstition was called to aid to make the widows docile.  In Fiji, for instance, to quote Westermarck’s summing up (125) of several authorities, widows