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Aboriginal Australian Love, a non-fiction book by Henry Theophilus Finck |
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Is Civilization Demoralizing? |
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_ 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 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. _ |
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