would soon bring such a “brave” to the gallows.  Some of the agencies by which the belief that wife-stealing and polygamy are honorable was displaced by the modern sentiment in favor of monogamy, will be considered later on.  Here I simply wish to enforce the additional moral that not only the ideas regarding bigamy and polygamy have changed, but the emotions aroused by such actions; execration having taken the place of admiration.  Judging by such cases, is it likely that ideas concerning women and love could change so utterly as they have since the days of the ancient Greeks, without changing the emotions of love itself?  Sentiments consist of ideas and emotions.  If both are altered, the sentiments must have changed as a matter of course.  Let us take as a further example the sentiment of modesty.

CURIOSITIES OF MODESTY

There are many Christian women who, if offered the choice between death and walking naked down the street, would choose death as being preferable to eternal disgrace and social suicide.  If they preferred the other alternative, they would be arrested and, if known to be respectable, sent to an insane asylum.  The English legend relates that “peeping Tom” was struck blind because he did not stay in the house as commanded when the good Lady Godiva was obliged to ride naked through the market-place.  So strong, indeed, is the sentiment of modesty in our community that the old-fashioned philosophers used to maintain it was an innate instinct, always present under normal conditions.  The fact that every child has to be gradually taught to avoid indecent exposure, ought to have enlightened these philosophers as to their error, which is further made plain to the orthodox by the Biblical story that in the beginning of human life the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed.

Naked and not ashamed is the condition of primitive man wherever climatic and other motives do not prescribe dress.  Writing of the Arabs at Wat El Negur, Samuel Baker says (N.T.A., 265): 

“Numbers of young girls and women were accustomed to bathe perfectly naked in the river just before our tent.  I employed them to catch small fish for bait; and for hours they would amuse themselves in this way, screaming with excitement and fun, and chasing the small fry with their long clothes in lieu of nets; their figures were generally well-shaped....  The men were constantly bathing in the clear waters of the Athabara, and were perfectly naked, although close to the women; we soon became accustomed to this daily scene, as we do at Brighton and other English bathing towns.”

In his work on German Africa (II., 123) Zoeller says that in Togoland

“the young girls did not hesitate in the least to remove their only article of clothing, a narrow strip of cloth, rub themselves with a native soap and then take a dip in the lagoon, before the eyes of white men as well as black.”

A page would be required merely to enumerate the tribes in Africa, Australia, and South America which never wear any clothing.