Not content with hating one another cordially, the different races,
peoples, and tribes have taken special pains at all times and
everywhere to erect within their own limits a number of barriers
against free choice and love. In France, Germany, and other European
countries there is still a strong prejudice against marriages between
nobles and commoners, though the commoner may be much nobler than the
aristocrat in everything except the genealogical table. Civilization
is gradually destroying this obstacle to love, which has done so much
to promote immorality and has led to so many tragedies involving a
number of kings and princes, victims to the illusion that accident of
birth is nobler than brains or refinement. But among the ancient
civilized and mediaeval peoples the social barrier was as rigidly held
up as the racial prejudices. Milman remarks, in his _History of Latin
Christianity_ (I., 499, 528), that among the ancient Romans
"there could be no marriages with slaves [though
slaves, being captives, were not necessarily of a lower
rank, but might be princesses].... The Emperor
Valentinian further defined low and abject persons who
might not aspire to lawful union with
freemen--actresses, daughters of actresses,
tavern-keepers, the daughters of tavern-keepers,
procurers (leones) or gladiators, or those who had kept
a public shop.... Till Roman citizenship had been
imparted to the whole Roman Empire, it would not
acknowledge marriage with barbarians to be more than a
concubinage. Cleopatra was called only in scorn the
wife of Antony. Berenice might not presume to be more
than the mistress of Titus. The Christian world closed
marriages again within still more and more jealous
limits. Interdictory statutes declared marriages with
Jews and heathens not only invalid but adulterous."
"The Salic and Ripuarian law condemned the freeman
guilty of this degradation [marrying a slave] to
slavery; where the union was between a free woman and a
slave, that of the Lombards and of the Burgundians,
condemned both parties to death; but if her parents
refused to put her to death, she became a slave of the
crown. The Ripuarian law condemned the female
delinquent to slavery; but the woman had the
alternative of killing her base-born husband. She was
offered a distaff and a sword. If she chose the distaff
she became a slave; if a sword she struck it to the
heart of her paramour and emancipated herself from her
degrading connection."
In mediaeval Germany the line was so sharply drawn between the social
classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the
punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous
custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged
by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither
she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death
she had no claim to the usual provisions legally made for widows.
In India the caste prejudices are so strong and varied that they form
almost insuperable barriers to free love-choice. "We find castes
within castes," says Sir Monier Williams (153), "so that even the
Brahmans are broken up and divided into numerous races, which again
are subdivided into numerous tribes, families, or sub-castes," and all
these, he adds, "do not intermarry." In Japan, until three decades
ago, social barriers as to marriage were rigidly enforced, and in
China, to this day, slaves, boatmen, actors, policemen, can marry
women of their own class only. Nor are these difficulties eliminated
at once as we descend the ladder of civilization. In Brazil, Central
America, in the Polynesian and other Pacific Islands and elsewhere we
find such barriers to free marriage, and among the Malayan Hovas of
Madagascar even the slaves are subdivided into three classes, which do
not intermarry! It is only among those peoples which are too low to be
able to experience sentimental love anyway that this formidable
obstacle of class prejudice vanishes, while race and tribal hatred
remain in full force.