others, especially when the couple were acquainted before
marriage.

It is extremely probable that in primitive man marriage only lasted
till the birth of a child, or at the most a few years. With
civilization the duration of marriage has been prolonged, higher
motives having become added to bodily charms, sexual appetite and the
instinct of procreation, and tending toward more lasting unions.

Moral reasons have given rise to laws of protection in marriage, but
the mania which man possesses of dogmatizing on everything has often
caused these laws to degenerate into abuse or religious absurdities.
In this way the modern form of our Christian monogamy has been imposed
by a tyrannical dogma of the Roman Church; a dogma which no doubt
started from an ideal point of view, but fell into disuse in practice,
owing to the fact that it did not take sufficient account of the
natural conditions and sexual requirements of the race. This explains
the present tendency to greater legal liberty, even when the moral
causes which tend to render monogamous unions durable multiply with
the progress of civilization.

HISTORY OF EXTRA-CONJUGAL SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

As monogamous marriage exists among the anthropoid apes, we have every
reason to believe that it existed with primitive man. In neither case
has it been the result of artificial laws, but the result of brute
force and congenital instincts inherited by natural evolution. It
often happened that one male vanquished another and took possession of
the female, or wife, of the vanquished. Others abducted the female by
surprise. Later on, marriage by exchange or by purchase, derived from
marriage by rape, probably constituted the first stage toward a legal
monogamous or polygamous union, as an element in the most primitive
human conventional organizations. In this way we can imagine the main
points of the prehistoric evolution of marriage.

When the conception of marriage took on a legal character, either that
of possession by the male, or that of a more or less equitable
contract between the two sexes, we can easily imagine that sexual
intercourse apart from marriage resulted as an inevitable complement.
Every artificial barrier which the human mind opposes to natural
instincts immediately gives rise to a movement of opposition on the
part of the latter. The matrimonial laws of primitive or
semi-civilized races punished adultery in the most barbarous manner by
torture and death, b