l she wield a club? Will she
poise a spear?"

But it was among the women of Hawaii that the motives of infanticide
reached their climax of frivolity. There mothers killed their children
because they were too lazy to bring them up and cook for them; or
because they wished to preserve their own beauty, or were unwilling to
suffer an interruption in their licentious amours; or because they
liked to roam about unburdened by babes; and sometimes for no other
reason than because they could not make them stop crying. So they
buried them alive though they might be months or even years old
(Ellis, _P.R_., IV., 240).

These revelations show that it is not "hardness of life" but "hardness
of heart"--sensual, selfish indulgence--that smothers the parental
instinct. To say that the conduct of such parents is brutal, would be
a great injustice to brutes. No species of animals, however low in the
scale of life, has ever been known to habitually kill its offspring.
In their treatment of females and young ones, animals are indeed, as a
rule, far superior to savages and barbarians. I emphasize this point
because several of my critics have accused me of a lack of knowledge
and thought and logic because I attributed some of the elements of
romantic love to animals and denied them to primitive human beings.
But there is no inconsistency in this. We shall see later on that
there are other things in which animals are superior not only to
savages but to some civilized peoples as high in the scale as Hindoos.

HONORABLE POLYGAMY

Turning now from the parental to the conjugal sphere we shall find
further interesting instances showing How Sentiments Change and Grow.
The monogamous sentiment--the feeling that a man and his wife belong
to each other exclusively--is now so strong that a person who commits
bigamy not only perpetrates a crime for which the courts may imprison
him for five years, but becomes a social outcast with whom respectable
people will have nothing more to do. The Mormons endeavored to make
polygamy a feature of their religion, but in 1882 Congress passed a
law suppressing it and punishing offenders. Did this monogamous
sentiment exist "always and everywhere?"

Livingstone relates (_M.S.A._, I., 306-312) that the King of the
Beetjuans (South Africa) was surprised to hear that his visitor had
only one wife:

"When we explained to him that, by the laws of our country,
people could not marry until they were of a