Chapman further declares (II., 75) that these people lead “comparatively” chaste lives.  I had supposed that, as an egg is either good or bad, so a man or woman is either chaste or unchaste.  Other writers, who had no desire to whitewash savages, tell us not only “comparatively” but positively what Bushman morals are.  A Bushman told Theophilus Halm (Globus, XVIII., 122) that quarrels for the possession of women often lead to murder; “nevertheless, the lascivious fellow assured me it was a fine thing to appropriate the wives of others.”  Wake (I., 205) says they lend their wives to strangers, and Lichtenstein tells us (II., 48) that “the wife is not indissolubly united to the husband; but when he gives her permission, she may go whither she will and associate with any other man.”  And again (42): 

“Infidelity to the marriage compact is not considered a crime, it is scarcely regarded by the offended person....  They seem to have no idea of the distinction of girl, maiden, and wife; they are all expressed by one word alone.  I leave every reader to draw from this single circumstance his own inference with regard to the nature of love and every kind of moral feeling among them."[137]

That this is not too severe a criticism is obvious from the fact that Lichtenstein, in judging savages, was rather apt to err on the side of leniency.  The equally generous and amiable missionary Moffat (174-75) censures him, for instance, for his favorable view of the Bechuanas, saying that he was not with them long enough to know their real character.  Had he dwelt among them, accompanied them on journeys, and known them as he (Moffat) did, “he would not have attempted to revive the fabled delights and bliss of ignorance reported to exist in the abodes of heathenism.”

It is in comparison with these Bechuanas that Chapman calls the Bushmen moral, obviously confounding morality with licentiousness.  Without having any moral principles at all, it is quite likely that the Bushmen are less licentious than their neighbors for the simple reason that they are less well-fed; for as old Burton remarks, for the most part those are “aptest to love that are young and lusty, live at ease, stall-fed, free from cares, like cattle in a rank pasture”—­whereas the Bushmen are nearly always thin, half-starved denizens of the African deserts, enervated by constant fears, and so unmanly that “a single musket shot,” says Lichtenstein, “will put a hundred to flight, and whoever rushes upon them with only a good stick in his hand has no reason to fear any resistance from ever so large a number.”

Such men are not apt to be heroes among women in any sense.  Indeed, Galton says (T.S.A., 178), “I am sure that Bushmen are, generally speaking, henpecked.  They always consult their wives.  The Damaras do not.”  Chapman himself, with unconscious humor, gives us (I., 391) a sample of the “love” which he found in “all Bushman marriages;” his remarks confirming at the same time the truth I dwelt on in the chapter on Individual Preference, that among savages the sexes are less individualized than with us, the men being more effeminate, the women viragoes: