Notwithstanding this striking and important fact, there is a large
number of sentimental writers who make the extraordinary claim that
the lower races, however savage they may be in everything else, are
like ourselves in their amorous relations; that they love and admire
personal beauty just as we do. The main object of the present volume
is to demolish this doctrine; to prove that sexual refinement and the
sense of personal beauty are not the earliest but the latest products
of civilization. I have shown elsewhere[5] that Japanese civilization
is in many important respects far superior to ours; yet in their
treatment of women and estimate of love, this race has not yet risen
above the barbarous stage; and it will be shown in this volume that if
we were to judge the ancient Greeks and the Hindoos from this point of
view, we should have to deny them the epithet of civilized. Morgan
found that the most advanced of American Indians, the Iroquois, had no
capacity for love. His testimony in detail will be found in its proper
place in this volume, together with that of competent observers
regarding other tribes and races. Some of this evidence was known to
the founders of the modern science of sociology. It led Spencer to
write _en passant_ (_Pr. Soc_., I., § 337, §339) that "absence of the
tender emotion ... habitually characterizes men of low types;" and
that the "higher sentiments accompanying union of the sexes ... do not
exist among primitive men." It led Sir John Lubbock to write (50)
regarding the lowest races that "love is almost unknown among them;
and marriage, in its lowest phases, is by no means a matter of
affection and companionship."