It may now be asked why the polygynist nations have not gravitated to
monogamy, like the latter-day saints of Salt Lake City. The answer is
not far to seek: their polygyny is limited. By the Mohammedan law a man
cannot marry more than four wives; and by the unwritten law of necessity
no man can keep more wives than he can afford; so that a man with
four wives must be quite as exceptional in Asia as a man with a
carriage-and-pair or a motor car is in Europe, where, nevertheless we
may all have as many carriages and motors as we can afford to pay for.
Kulin polygyny, though unlimited, is not really a popular institution:
if you are a person of high caste you pay another person of very august
caste indeed to make your daughter momentarily one of his sixty or
seventy momentary wives for the sake of ennobling your grandchildren;
but this fashion of a small and intensely snobbish class is negligible
as a general precedent. In any case, men and women in the East do not
marry anyone they fancy, as in England and America. Women are secluded
and marriages are arranged. In Salt Lake City the free unsecluded woman
could see and meet the ablest man of the community, and tempt him
to make her his tenth wife by all the arts peculiar to women in
English-speaking countries. No eastern woman can do anything of the
sort. The man alone has any initiative; but he has no access to the
woman; besides, as we have seen, the difficulty created by male license
is not polygyny but polyandry, which is not allowed.
Consequently, if we are to make polygyny a success, we must limit it.
If we have two women to every one man, we must allow each man only two
wives. That is simple; but unfortunately our own actual proportion is,
roughly, something like 1 1/11 woman to 1 man. Now you cannot enact that
each man shall be allowed 1 1/11 wives, or that each woman who cannot
get a husband all to herself shall divide herself between eleven already
married husbands. Thus there is no way out for us through polygyny.
There is no way at all out of the present system of condemning the
superfluous women to barrenness, except by legitimizing the children of
women who are not married to the fathers.