MARRIAGE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1686, 22 June 1904, Page 24

MARRIAGE

According to Lechy, bachelors and spinsters are on© of the distinguishing features of civilisation as opposed to savagery. Savage man is, almost everywhere, a marrying man. Often lie is a much married man. He abhors the single state. Old maids and old bachelors are raro in all savage and barbarous communities. The rule is to marry early, and sometimes to marry often. Children are pledged in marriage even before they are born; among the Talamanca Indians “a bride is generally from 10 to 14 years old,” among certain other Central American tribes the parents “try to get a tvife for their son when he is 9 or 10 years old," among the Guanas “the girls who marry latest marry at thß age of 9,” among the Santals a lad marries “as a rule about the age of 18 or 17, and a girl at that of 15,” and among the Kandhs, “a boy marries when, he reaches his 10th or 12th year, his.Ayife being usually about 4 years older.” “S'o strong is the sentiment in favour of- marriage among uncivilised races-/' declares one Avriter, “that a person avlio does not marry is looked npon almost as an unnatural being, or at any rate is disdained. It is or Avas a matter of universal belief in Fiji,” he continues, “that he who died Avithout having been married was stopped on the road to Paradise by the god N'angganangga, and ‘smashed to atoms/ The Santais regard the obstinate bachelor as little better than a thief, and not at all better than a witcli, and both sexes treat him with supreme contempt. In Kaffir kraals a bachelor lias no voice. In Tlascala a man of full age, avlio refuses to marry ‘had his hair cut off for shame/ In Korea, on the authority of Rev. John Ross, The male human being avlio is unmarried is never called a “man,” whatever his age, but goes by the name of YatoAv, a name given by the Chinese to unmarriageable girls, and *a “man” of 13 or 14 has a perfect right to strike, abuse, and order about the yatoAv of 39, who dare not so- much as open- his lips to complain. Blodern Hindoos honour marriage so highly that no bachelor is ever consulted on any important affair, and the man who cannot be induced to marry, is looked upon as ‘beyond the pale of Nature/ In Japan, as in China, celibacy is both eschewed and tabooed, and in the latter country,especially, it is all but impossible to avoid marriage, be you 'robust or infirm, Avell formed or deformed.’ Indeed, if a Chinese be sick Avith a disease Avhich is practically incurable, his parents Avill by no means suffer him to die, until they have procured him a wife. ‘Nay, so indispensible is marriage considered among this people/ observes Dr Westermarck, ‘that, even the dead are married/ Thus the spirits of males avlio die in infancy or in boyhood are, in due time married to the spirits of females.”