“Polygamy,” writes Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Oct., 1904), though he recognizes the advantages of monogamy, “as a racial institution, among animals as among men, has many solid and weighty considerations in its favor, and has resulted in both human and pre-human times, in the production of a very high type of both individual and social development.”  He points out that it promotes intelligence, cooeperation, and division of labor, while the keen competition for women weeds out the weaker and less attractive males.

Among our European ancestors, alike among Germans and Celts, polygyny and other sexual forms existed as occasional variations.  Tacitus noted polygyny in Germany, and Caesar found in Britain that brothers would hold their wives in common, the children being reckoned to the man to whom the woman had been first given in marriage (see, e.g., Traill’s Social England, vol. i, p. 103, for a discussion of this point).  The husband’s assistant, also, who might be called in to impregnate the wife when the husband was impotent, existed in Germany, and was indeed a general Indo-Germanic institution (Schrader, Reallexicon, art.  “Zeugungshelfer").  The corresponding institution of the concubine has been still more deeply rooted and widespread.  Up to comparatively modern times, indeed, in accordance with the traditions of Roman law, the concubine held a recognized and honorable position, below that of a wife but with definite legal rights, though it was not always, or indeed usually, legal for a married man to have a concubine.  In ancient Wales, as well as in Rome, the concubine was accepted and never despised (R.B.  Holt, “Marriage Laws of the Cymri,” Journal Anthropological Institute, Aug. and Nov., 1898, p. 155).  The fact that when a concubine entered the house of a married man her dignity and legal position were less than those of the wife preserved domestic peace and safeguarded the wife’s interests. (A Korean husband cannot take a concubine under his roof without his wife’s permission, but she rarely objects, and seems to enjoy the companionship, says Louise Jordan Miln, Quaint Korea, 1895, p. 92.) In old Europe, we must remember, as Dufour points out in speaking of the time of Charlemagne (Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. iii, p. 226), “concubine” was an honorable term; the concubine was by no means a mistress, and she could be accused of adultery just the same as a wife.  In England, late in the thirteenth century, Bracton speaks of the concubina legitima as entitled to certain rights and considerations, and it was the same in other parts of Europe, sometimes for several centuries later (see Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. i, p. 230).  The early Christian Church was frequently inclined to recognize the concubine, at all events if attached to an unmarried man, for we may trace in the Church “the wish to look upon every permanent union