QUESTION OF POLYGAMY.

Montesquieu infers that the law which permits polygamy is physically conformable to the climate of Asia.  The season of female beauty precedes that of their reason, and from its prematurity soon decays.  The empire of their charms is short.  It is therefore natural, the president observes, that a man should leave one wife to take another:  that he should seek a renovation of those charms which had withered in his possession.  But are these the real circumstances of polygamy?  Surely not.  It implies the contemporary enjoyment of women in the same predicament; and I should consider it as a vice that has its source in the influence of a warm atmosphere upon the passions of men, which, like the cravings of other disordered appetites, make them miscalculate their wants.  It is probably the same influence, on less rigid nerves, that renders their thirst of revenge so much more violent than among northern nations; but we are not therefore to pronounce murder to be physically conformable to a southern climate.  Far be it from my intention however to put these passions on a level; I only mean to show that the president’s reasoning proves too much.  It must further be considered that the genial warmth which expands the desires of the men, and prompts a more unlimited exertion of their faculties, does not inspire their constitutions with proportionate vigour; but on the contrary renders them in this respect inferior to the inhabitants of the temperate zone; whilst it equally influences the desires of the opposite sex without being found to diminish from their capacity of enjoyment.  From which I would draw this conclusion, that if nature intended that one woman only should be the companion of one man, in the colder regions of the earth it appears also intended a fortiori that the same law should be observed in the hotter; inferring nature’s design, not from the desires, but from the abilities with which she has endowed mankind.

Montesquieu has further suggested that the inequality in the comparative numbers of each sex born in Asia, which is represented to be greatly superior on the female side, may have a relation to the law that allows polygamy.  But there is strong reason to deny the reality of this supposed excess.  The Japanese account, taken from Kaempfer, which makes them to be in the proportion of twenty-two to eighteen, is very inconclusive, as the numbering of the inhabitants of a great city can furnish no proper test; and the account of births at Bantam, which states the number of girls to be ten to one boy, is not only manifestly absurd, but positively false.  I can take upon me to assert that the proportion of the sexes throughout Sumatra does not sensibly differ from that ascertained in Europe; nor could I ever learn from the inhabitants of the many eastern islands whom I have conversed with that they were conscious of any disproportion in this respect.

CONNEXION BETWEEN POLYGAMY AND PURCHASE OF WIVES.