saw herself in the looking-glass with great complacency.  Suddenly her husband returned from shooting, with three or four Indians, when the whole party burst into a loud fit of laughter at her, and began to joke about her new habiliments.  Grace was quite abashed, blushed, wept, and ran to hide herself in the bed-chamber of the lady, where she stript herself of the clothes, went out of the window, and returned naked into the room.  A proof that when her husband saw her dressed for the first time, she felt a sensation somewhat similar to that which a European woman might experience who was surprised without her usual drapery.”

Another paradox remains to be noted.  Anthropologists have now proved beyond all possibility of doubt that modesty, far from having led to the use of clothing, was itself merely a secondary consequence of the gradual adoption of apparel as a protection.  They have also shown[10] that the earliest forms of dress were extremely scanty, and were intended not to cover certain parts of the body, but actually and wantonly to call attention to them, while in other cases the only parts of the body habitually covered were such as we should consider it no special impropriety to leave uncovered.  But enough has been said to demonstrate what we started out to prove:  that the strong sentiment of modesty in our community—­so strong that many insist it must be part and parcel of human nature (like love!)—­has, like all the other sentiments here discussed, grown up slowly from microscopic beginnings.

INDIFFERENCE TO CHASTITY

Closely connected with modesty, and yet entirely distinct from it, is another and still stronger sentiment—­the regard for chastity.  Many an American officer whose brave wife accompanied him in a frontier war has been asked by her to promise that he would shoot her with his own revolver rather than let her fall into the clutches of licentious Indians.  Though deliberate murder is punishable by death, no American jury has ever convicted a man for slaying the seducer of his wife, daughter, or sister.  Modern law punishes rape with death, and its victim is held to have suffered a fate worse than death.  The brightest of all jewels in a bride’s crown of virtues is chastity—­a jewel without which all the others lose their value.  Yet this jewel of jewels formerly had no more value than a pebble in a brook-bed.  The sentiment in behalf of chastity had no existence for ages, and for a long time after it came into existence chastity was known not as a virtue but only as a necessity, inculcated by fear of punishment or loss of worldly advantages.

In support of this statement a whole volume might be written; but as abundant evidence will be given in later chapters relating to the lower races in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, America, and Asia, only a few instances need be cited here.  In his recent work on the Origin and Growth of the Moral Sense (1898), Alexander Sutherland, an Australian author, writes (I., 180):