stranger to her, and her relation to him is scarcely more
than that of sex. Her brother she loves beyond any other. She will mourn
for him with the deepest sorrow, but it would be a shame for a woman to
mourn for her husband, much more for a bride to mourn for her
bridegroom. In former times it was improper for a man to begin conjugal
life immediately after marriage. The bride attendants, brothers of the
groom, spent the first night by the side of the bride, and for the next
three nights the mother or sister of the groom slept with the bride. The
groom is reluctant. A Servian woman is derided if she has a child within
a year after marriage. In some districts sex morality is very high, in
others very low. In Carinthia it is worst. There, in the Gurkthal, the
illegitimate births are twice as numerous as the legitimate, so that the
marriage institution hardly exists. In Slavonic Croatia persons who
marry are indifferent to each other's previous conduct with others.
Amongst other southern Slavs, at a wedding, the groom must neither talk
nor eat, out of shame, and the bride must weep while being dressed. It
is reported from Bocca di Cattaro, in the Balkan peninsula, that public
contempt is so severe against illicit acts by men before marriage that
such acts are very rare amongst those who have any reputation or
position to lose.[1209]

+378. Russian sex mores.+ A custom widely prevalent through parts of
Great Russia and the adjacent Slavonic regions, until the nineteenth
century, was that the father married his son, as a boy, to a
marriageable young woman, whom the father then took as his own
concubine. When the son grew up his wife was advanced in life and the
mother of several children. He then did what his father had done. The
large house and joint family offered temptation to this custom, and has
generally been believed to be to blame for it. Rhamm contradicts that
opinion.[1210] The same custom existed amongst the Bulgarians.[1211]
Another motive for it is suggested, that the father wanted to increase
the number of laborers in the big house. In 1623, in Poland, the death
penalty was provided for a man who should so abuse his daughter-in-law.
[1212] The same custom is reported from the Tamils of southeast
India.[1213] In the mountains on the southwestern frontier of Russia
there was, in the eighteenth century, an almost entire lack of sex
mores. Amongst all the Slavonic peoples females are in a very inferior
status and