“I have,” he says,

“continually met a file of women carrying loads of rice or coffee on their heads, while the men would follow, lazily lounging along, with a long stick in their hands, like shepherds driving a flock of sheep....  I have seen a man go into his house, where his wife was lying asleep on the bed, rudely awake her, and order her to lie on the floor, while he made himself comfortable on the cushions.”

But I need not add in this place any further instances to the hundreds given in other parts of this volume, revealing uncivilized man’s disposition to regard woman as made for his convenience, both in this world and the next.  Nor is it necessary to add that such an attitude is an insuperable obstacle to love, which in its essence is altruistic.

VI.  CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

As late as the sixth century the Christian Provincial Council of Macon debated the question whether women have souls.  I know of no early people, savage, barbarous, semi-civilized or civilized—­from the Australian to the Greek—­in which the men did not look down on the women as inferior beings.  Now contempt is the exact opposite of adoration, and where it prevails there can of course be no romantic love.[130]

VII.  CAPTURE AND SALE OF BRIDES

In the Homeric poems we read much about young women who were captured and forced to become the concubines of the men who had slain their fathers, brothers, and husbands.  Other brides are referred to as [Greek:  alphesiboiai], wooed with rich presents, literally “bringing in oxen.”  Among other ancient nations—­Assyrians, Hebrews, Babylonians, Chaldeans, etc., brides had to be bought with property or its equivalent in service (as in the case of Jacob and Rachel).  Serving for a bride until the parents feel repaid for their selfish trouble in bringing her up, also prevails among savages as low as the African Bushman and the Fuegian Indians, and is not therefore, as Herbert Spencer holds, a higher or later form of “courtship” than capture or purchase.  But it is less common than purchase, which has been a universal custom.  “All over the earth,” says Letourneau (137),

“among all races and at all times, wherever history gives us information, we find well-authenticated examples of marriage by purchase, which allows us to assert that during the middle period of civilization, the right of parents over their children, and especially over their daughters, included in all countries the privilege of selling them.”

In Australia a knife or a glass bottle has been held sufficient compensation for a wife.  A Tartar parent will sell his daughter for a certain number of sheep, horses, oxen, or pounds of butter; and so on in innumerable regions.  As an obstacle to free choice and love unions, nothing more effective could be devised; for what Burckhardt writes (B. and W., I., 278) of the Egyptian peasant girls has a general application.  They are, he says, “sold in matrimony by their fathers to the highest bidders; a circumstance that frequently causes the most mean and unfeeling transactions.”