(Cranz, I., 146.) They consider children troublesome, and the race is dying out.  Women are not allowed to eat of the first seal of the season.  The sick are left to take care of themselves. (Hall, II., 322, I., 103.) In years of scarcity widows “are rejected from the community, and hover about the encampments like starving wolves ... until hunger and cold terminate their wretched existence.” (M’Lean, II., 143.) Men and women alike are without any sense of modesty; in their warm hovels both sexes divest themselves of nearly all their clothing.  Nor, although they fight and punish jealousy, have they any regard for chastity per se.  Lending a wife or daughter to a guest is a recognized duty of hospitality.  Young couples live together on trial.  When the husband is away hunting or fishing the wife has her intrigues, and often adultery is committed sans gene on either side.  Unnatural vices are indulged in without secrecy, and altogether the picture is one of utter depravity and coarseness.[257]

Under such circumstances we hardly needed the specific assurance of Rink, who collected and published a volume of Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, and who says that “never is much room given in this poetry to the almost universal feeling of love.”  He refers, of course, to any kind of love, and he puts it very mildly.  Not only is there no trace of altruistic affection in any of these tales and traditions, but the few erotic stories recorded (e.g., pp. 236-37) are too coarse to be cited or summarized here.  Hall, too, concluded that “love—­if it come at all—­comes after marriage.”  He also informs us (II., 313) that there “generally exists between husband and wife a steady but not very demonstrative affection;” but here he evidently wrongs the Eskimos; for, as he himself remarks (126), they

“always summarily punish their wives for any real or imaginary offence.  They seize the first thing at hand—­a stone, knife, hatchet, or spear—­and throw it at the offending woman, just as they would at their dogs.”

What could be more “demonstrative” than such “steady affection?”

INDIA—­WILD TRIBES AND TEMPLE GIRLS

India, it has been aptly said, “forms a great museum of races in which we can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture.”  It is this multiplicity of races and their lack of patriotic co-operation that explains the conquest of the hundreds of millions of India by the tens of millions of England.  Obviously it would be impossible to make any general assertion regarding love that would apply equally to the 10,000,000 educated Brahmans, who consider themselves little inferior to gods, the 9,000,000 outcasts who are esteemed and treated infinitely worse than animals, and the 17,000,000 of the aboriginal tribes who are comparable in position and culture to our American Indians.  Nevertheless, we can get an approximately correct composite portrait of love in India by making two groups and studying first, the aboriginal tribes, and then the more or less civilized Hindoos (using this word in the most comprehensive sense), with their peculiar customs, laws, poetic literature, and bayaderes, or temple girls.