It has been seriously maintained that the chastity of savages, so far as it exists at all, is due to European civilization.  It is doubtless true that this is the case with individual persons and tribes, but there is ample evidence from various parts of the world to show that this is by no means the rule.  And, indeed, it may be said—­with no disregard of the energy and sincerity of missionary efforts—­that it could not be so.  A new system of beliefs and practices, however excellent it may be in itself, can never possess the same stringent and unquestionable force as the system in which an individual and his ancestors have always lived, and which they have never doubted the validity of.  That this is so we may have occasion to observe among ourselves.  Christian teachers question the wisdom of bringing young people under free-thinking influence, because, although they do not deny the morals of free-thinkers, they believe that to unsettle the young may have a disastrous effect, not only on belief, but also on conduct.  Yet this dangerously unsettling process has been applied by missionaries on a wholesale scale to races which in some respect are often little more than children.  When, therefore, we are considering the chastity of savages we must not take into account those peoples which have been brought into close contact with Europeans.

In order to understand the sexual habits of savages generally there are two points which always have to be borne in mind as of the first importance:  (1) the checks restraining sexual intercourse among savages, especially as regards time and season, are so numerous, and the sanctions upholding those checks so stringent, that sexual excess cannot prevail to the same extent as in civilization; (2) even in the absence of such checks, that difficulty of obtaining sexual erethism which has been noted as so common among savages, when not overcome by the stimulating influences prevailing at special times and seasons, and which is probably in large measure dependent on hard condition of life as well as an insensitive quality of nervous texture, still remains an important factor, tending to produce a natural chastity.  There is a third consideration which, though from the present point of view subsidiary, is not without bearing on our conception of chastity among savages:  the importance, even sacredness, of procreation is much more generally recognized by savage than by civilized peoples, and also a certain symbolic significance is frequently attached to human procreation as related to natural fruitfulness generally; so that a primitive sexual orgy, instead of being a mere manifestation of licentiousness, may have a ritual significance, as a magical means of evoking the fruitfulness of fields and herds.[183]