t 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 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 several authorities, widows