The reader is now in a position to judge of the reliability of the
"fearless" Stephens as a witness, and of the blind bias of the
anthropologist who uses him as such. It surely ought not to be
necessary to prove that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide,
wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant as
unreproved national customs, could not possibly be refined and moral
in their sexual relations, which offer the greatest of all temptations
to unrestrained selfishness. Yet Stephens tells us in his article that
before the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and
"conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;" while
Westermarck (61, 64, 65) classes the Australians with those savages
"among whom sexual intercourse out of wedlock is of rare occurrence."
On page 70 he declares that "in a savage condition of life ... there
is comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations;" and on
page 539, in summing up his doctrines, he asserts that "we have some
reason to believe that irregular connections between the sexes have,
on the whole, exhibited a tendency to increase along with the progress
of civilization." The refutation of this libel on civilization--which
is widely believed--is one of the main objects of the following
pages--is, in fact, one of the main objects of this whole volume.
There are a few cities in Southern Europe where the rate of
illegitimacy equals, and in one or two cases slightly exceeds, the
legitimate births; but that is owing to the fact that betrayed girls
from the country nearly always go to the cities to find a refuge and
hide their shame. Taking the countries as a whole we find that even
Scotland, which has always had a somewhat unsavory reputation in this
respect, had, in 1897, only 6.98 per cent of illegitimate births--say
seven in a hundred; the highest rate since 1855 having been 10.2.
There are, of course, besides this, cases of uncertain paternity, but
their number is comparatively small, and it certainly is much larger
in the _less_ civilized countries of Europe than in the more
civilized. Taking the five or six most advanced countries of Europe
and America, it is safe to say that the paternity is certain in ninety
cases out of a hundred. If we now look at the Australians as described
by eye-witnesses since the earliest exploring tours, we find a state
of affairs which makes paternity uncertain _in all cases without
exception_, and also a complete indifference on the subject.