on hearing of the monogamous life of the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, exclaimed in disgust: “They live like the apes.”
We may assume that little hardship arises from incompatibility of temperament among the Igorrotes or the Veddahs, and there is no need to describe the eccentric forms of marriage which arose among higher savages. None of the great civilisations of the past entertained the idea of indissoluble marriage. The clergy, of course, know nothing of the real line of evolution, and (as Bishop Diggle has done) they represent the Roman system as a comparative refinement of early promiscuity, on which Christianity was to make the final advance. The precious testimony of Juvenal is invoked (against the warning of all modern historians): and we are expected to shudder because St. Jerome tells us of a Roman lady who had been married a score of times. It is not stated what harm was done to the lady, or to anybody else, or whether she was a freak in her generation. It is enough, as Mrs. Humphry Ward knows, to say that divorce is frequent anywhere, and thousands of hands will rise to heaven: what the precise social consequences are the thousand of heads seem to regard as irrelevant.
I have read most of the literature of the Roman Imperial period, and have found that the greater part of the statements made about it by clerical moralists are rubbish. Every serious student knows that it was precisely the more rigid and intolerable
