marriages”—­a most amazing “even” in view of what he is trying to prove.  A modern lover, as I have said before, would reject the very idea of such a trial marriage with the utmost scorn and indignation, because he feels certain that his love is eternal and unalterable.  Time may show that he was mistaken, but that does not affect his present feeling.  That sublime confidence in the eternity of his passion is one of the hall-marks of romantic love.  The Egyptian had it not.  He not only sanctioned degrading trial marriages, but enacted a barbarous law which enabled a man to divorce any wife at pleasure by simply pronouncing the words “thou art expelled.”  In modern Egypt, says Lane (I., 247-51), there are many men who have had twenty, thirty, or more wives, and women who have had a dozen or more husbands.  Some take a new wife every month.  Thus the Egyptians are matrimonially on a level with the savage and barbarian North American Indians, Tasmanians, Samoans, Dyaks, Malayans, Tartars, many negro tribes, Arabs, etc.

ARABIAN LOVE

Arabia is commonly supposed to be the country in which chivalry originated.  This belief seems to rest on the fact that the Arabs spared women in war.  But the Australians did the same, and where women are saved only to be used as slaves or concubines we cannot speak of chivalry.  The Arabs treated their own women well only when they were able to capture or buy slaves to do the hard work for them; in other cases their wives were their slaves.  To this day, when the family moves, the husband rides on the camel while the wife trudges along on foot, loaded down with kitchen utensils, bedding, and her child on top.  If a woman happens to ride on a camel she must get off and walk if she meets a man, by way of showing her respect for the superior sex. (Niebuhr, 50.) The birth of a daughter is regarded as a calamity, mitigated only by the fact that she will bring in some money as a bride.  Marriage is often little more than a farce.  Burckhardt knew Bedouins who, before they were fifty years old, had been married to more than fifty different women.  Chavanne, in his book on the Sahara (397-401), gives a pathetic picture of the fate of the Arab girls: 

“Usually wedded very young (the marriage of a youth of fourteen to a girl of eleven is nothing unusual), the girl finds in most cases, after five or six years, that her conjugal career is at an end.  The husband tires of her and sends her back, without cogent reasons, to her parents.  If there are no parents to return to, she abandons herself, in many cases, to the vice of prostitution.”

If not discarded, her fate is none the less deplorable.  “While young she receives much attention, but when her charms begin to fade she becomes the servant of her husband and of his new wife.”