In his collection of Esthonian folk-songs Neus has a poem which pathetically pictures the fate of a bartered bride.  A girl going to the field to cut flax meets a young man who informs her bluntly that she belongs to him, as he has bought her.  “And who undertook to sell me?” she asks.  “Your father and mother, your sister and brother,” he replies, adding frankly that he won the father’s favor with a present of a horse, the mother’s with a cow, the sister’s with a bracelet, the brother’s with an ox.  Then the unwilling bride lifts her voice and curses the family:  “May the father’s horse rot under him; may the mother’s cow yield blood instead of milk!” Hundreds of millions of bartered brides have borne their fate more meekly.  It is needless to add that what has been said here applies a fortiori to captured brides.

VIII.  INFANT MARRIAGES

Of the diabolical habit of forcing girls into marriage before they had reached the age of puberty and its wide prevalence I have already spoken (293), and reference will be made to it in many of the pages following this.  Here I may, therefore, confine myself to a few details relating to one country, by way of showing vividly what a deadly obstacle to courtship, free choice, love, and every tender and merciful feeling, this cruel custom forms.  Among all classes and castes of Hindoos it has been customary from time immemorial to unite boys of eight; seven, even six years, to girls still younger.  It is even prescribed by the laws of Manu that a man of twenty-four should marry a girl of eight.  Old Sanscrit verses have been found declaring that “the mother, father, and oldest brother of a girl shall all be damned if they allow her to reach maturity without being married;” and the girl herself, in such a case, is cast out into the lowest class, too low for anyone to marry her.[131] In some cases marriage means merely engagement, the bride remaining at home with her parents, who do not part with her till some years later.  Often, however, the husband takes immediate possession of his child-wife, and the consequences are horrible.  Of 205 cases reported in a Bengal Medico-Legal Report, 5 ended fatally, 38 were crippled, and the general effect of such cruelty is pathetically touched on by Mme. Ryder, who found it impossible to describe the anguish she felt when she saw these half-developed females, with their expression of hopeless suffering, their skeleton arms and legs, marching behind their husbands at the prescribed distance, with never a smile on their faces.

It would be a mistake to seek a partial excuse for this inhumanity in the early maturing effects of a warm climate.  Mme. Ryder expressly states that a Hindoo girl of ten, instead of seeming older than a European girl of that age, resembles our children at five or six years.

IX.  PREVENTION OF FREE CHOICE