pointed to go forward on swift steeds to dig the grave, and honor the funeral with lamentations." (Dobrizhoffer II., 267.) During the ceremony of making a skeleton of a body the Patagonians, as Falkner informs us (119), indulge in singing in a mournful tone of voice, and striking the ground, to frighten away the Valichus or Evil Beings. Some of the Indians also visit the relatives of the dead, indulging in antics which show that the whole thing is done for effect and pastime. "During this visit of condolence," Falkner continues, "they cry, howl, and sing, in the most dismal manner; straining out tears, and pricking their arms and thighs with sharp thorns, to make them bleed. For this show of grief they are paid with glass beads," etc.

The Rev. W. Ellis writes that the Tahitians, when someone had died, "not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but tore their hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark's teeth or knives in a most shocking manner." That this was less an expression of genuine grief than a result of the barbarous love of excitement, follows from what he adds that in a milder form, this loud wailing and cutting with shark's teeth was "an expression of joy as well as of grief." (Pol. Res., I., 527.) The same writer relates in his book on Hawaii (148) that when a chief or king died on that island, "the people ran to and fro without their clothes, appearing and acting more like demons than human beings; every vice was practised and almost every species of crime. perpetrated."

J. T. Irving tells a characteristic story (226-27) of an Indian girl whom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song "so despairing that it seemed to well out from a broken heart." A half-breed friend, who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion by informing him. that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as she had nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl over her brother's grave. The brother had been dead five years!

The whole question of aboriginal mourning is patly summed up in a witty remark made by James Adair more

than a century ago (1775). He has seen Choctaw mourners, he declares (187), "pour out tears like fountains of water; but after thus tiring themselves they might with perfect propriety have asked themselves, And who is dead?"".

THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING

Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related by McLean (I., 254–55): A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair. The other females "evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down their cheeks, and beating their breasts;" yet as soon as the rites were ended, these women" were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had returned from a wedding." The widow alone remained, being obliged by custom" to mourn day and night. "The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon it. The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the wretched creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was thrust forward by her husband's relatives at the point of their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself almost scorched to death. Her relatives were present merely to preserve her life; when no longer able to stand they dragged her away, and this intervention often led to bloody quar

rels.'

Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean's day was simply a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the Lithua

nians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.1

Some writers have advanced the opinion that jealousy prompted the men to compel their wives to follow them into death. But the most widely accepted opinion is that expressed long ago by St. Boniface when he declared regarding the Wends that "they preserve their conjugal love with such ardent zeal that the wife refuses to survive her husband ; and she is especially admired among women who takes her own life in order to be burnt on the same pile with her master." This view is the fourth of the mistakes I have undertaken to demolish in this chapter.

In the monumental work of Ploss and Bartels (II., 514), the opinion is advanced that the custom of slaughtering widows on the death of their husbands is the result of the grossly materialistic view the races in question hold in regard to a future world. It is supposed that a warrior will reappear with all his physical attributes and wants; for which reason he is arranged in his best clothes, his weapons are placed by his side, and often animals and slaves are slaughtered to be useful to him in his new existence. His principal servant and provider of home comforts, however, is his wife, wherefore she, too, is expected to follow him.

This, no doubt, is the truth about widow-burning; but it is not the whole truth. To comprehend all the horrors of the situation we must realize clearly that it was the fiendish selfishness of the men, extending even beyond death, which thus subjected their wives to a cruel death, and that the widows, on their part, did not follow them because of the promptings of affection, but either under physical compulsion or in consequence of a systematic course of moral reprobation and social persecution which made death preferable to life. In Peru, for instance, where widows were not killed

1 Details and authorities in Ploss-Bartels, II., 514-17; Westermarck, 125-26; Letourneau, Chap. XV.

against their will, but were allowed to choose between widowhood and being buried alive, "the wife or servant who preferred life to the act of martyrdom, which was to attest their fidelity, was an object of general contempt, and devoted or doomed to a life worse than death." The consequence of this was that "generally the wives and servants offered themselves voluntarily, and there are even instances of wives who preferred suicide to prove their conjugal devotion when they were prevented from descending to the grave with the body of their consort." (Rivero and Tschudi, 186.) Usually, too, superstition was called to aid to make the widows docile. In Fiji, for instance, to quote Westermarck's summing up (125) of sev eral authorities, widows "were either buried alive or strangled, often at their own desire, because they believed that in this way alone could they reach the realms of bliss, and that she who met her death with the greatest devotedness would become the favorite wife in the abode of spirits. On the other hand, a widow who did not permit herself to be killed was considered an adulteress."

To realize vividly how far widow-burning is from being an act of voluntary wifely devotion one must read Abbé Dubois's account of the matter (I., chap. 21). He explains that, however chaste and devoted a wife may have been during her husband's life, she is treated worse than the lowest outcast if she wants to survive him. By a "voluntary" death, on the contrary, she becomes "an illustrious victim of conjugal attachment," and is "considered in the light of a deity." On

the way to the funeral pyre the accompanying multitude stretch out their hands toward her in token of admiration. They behold her as already translated into the paradise of Vishnu and seem to envy her happy lot. The women run up to her to receive her blessing, and she knows that afterward crowds of votaries will daily frequent her shrine. The Brahmans compliment her on her heroism. (Sometimes drugs are administered to stifle her fears.) She knows, too, that it is useless to falter at the last moment, as a change of heart would be an eternal disgrace, not only to herself but to her relatives, who, therefore, stand around with sabres and rifles to intimi

date her. In short, with satanic ingenuity, every possible appeal is made to her family pride, vanity, longing for future bliss and divine honors after life, enforced by the knowledge that if she lives earth will be a hell to her, so that refusal is next to impossible. And this is the much-vaunted “conjugal affection and fidelity" of Hindoo widows!

FEMININE DEVOTION IN ANCIENT LITERATURE

The practice of "voluntary" widow-burning is, as the foregoing shows, about as convincing proof of wifely devotion as the presence of an ox in the butcher's stall is proof of his gastronomic devotion to man. In reality it is, as I have said, simply the most diabolical aspect of man's aboriginal disposition to look on woman as made solely for his own comfort and pleasure, here and hereafter. Now it is very instructive to note that whenever there is a story of conjugal devotion in Oriental or ancient classical literature it is nearly always inspired by the same spirit-the idea that the woman, as an inferior being, should subject herself to any amount of suffering if she can thereby save her sacred lord and master the slightest pang. For instance, an old Arabic writer (Kamil Mobarrad, p. 529) relates how a devoted wife whose husband was condemned to death disfigured her beautiful face in order to let him die with the consoling feeling that she would not marry again. The current notion that such stories are proof of conjugal devotion is the fifth of the mistakes to be corrected in this chapter. These stories were written by men, selfish men, who intended them as lessons to indicate to the women what was expected of them. Were it otherwise, why should not the men, too, be represented, at least occasionally, as devoted and self-sacrificing? Hector is tender to Andromache, and in the Sanscrit drama, Kausika's Wrath, the King and the Queen contend with one another as to who shall be the victim of that wrath; but these are the only instances of the kind that occur to me. This interesting question will be further considered in the chapters on India and Greece, where corroborative stories will be quoted. Here I