XIV. SOCIAL BARRIERS

Not content with hating one another cordially, the different races, peoples, and tribes have taken special pains at all times and everywhere to erect within their own limits a number of barriers against free choice and love. In France, Germany, and other European countries there is still a strong prejudice against marriages between nobles and commoners, though the commoner may be much nobler than the aristocrat in everything except the genealogical table. Civilization is gradually destroying this obstacle to love, which has done so much to promote immorality and has led to so many tragedies involving a number of kings and princes, victims to the illusion that accident of birth is nobler than brains or refinement. But among the ancient civilized and mediaeval peoples the social barrier was as rigidly held up as the racial prejudices. Milman remarks, in his History of Latin Christianity (I., 499, 528), that among the ancient Romans

"there could be no marriages with slaves [though slaves, being captives, were not necessarily of a lower rank, but might be princesses]…. The Emperor Valentinian further defined low and abject persons who might not aspire to lawful union with freemen—actresses, daughters of actresses, tavern-keepers, the daughters of tavern-keepers, procurers (leones) or gladiators, or those who had kept a public shop…. Till Roman citizenship had been imparted to the whole Roman Empire, it would not acknowledge marriage with barbarians to be more than a concubinage. Cleopatra was called only in scorn the wife of Antony. Berenice might not presume to be more than the mistress of Titus. The Christian world closed marriages again within still more and more jealous limits. Interdictory statutes declared marriages with Jews and heathens not only invalid but adulterous."

"The Salic and Ripuarian law condemned the freeman guilty of this degradation [marrying a slave] to slavery; where the union was between a free woman and a slave, that of the Lombards and of the Burgundians, condemned both parties to death; but if her parents refused to put her to death, she became a slave of the crown. The Ripuarian law condemned the female delinquent to slavery; but the woman had the alternative of killing her base-born husband. She was offered a distaff and a sword. If she chose the distaff she became a slave; if a sword she struck it to the heart of her paramour and emancipated herself from her degrading connection."

In mediaeval Germany the line was so sharply drawn between the social classes that for a long time slavery, or even death, was the punishment for a mixed marriage. In course of time this barbarous custom fell into disuse, but free choice continued to be discouraged by the law that if a man married a woman beneath him in rank, neither she nor her children were raised to his rank, and in case of his death she had no claim to the usual provisions legally made for widows.

In India the caste prejudices are so strong and varied that they form almost insuperable barriers to free love-choice. "We find castes within castes," says Sir Monier Williams (153), "so that even the Brahmans are broken up and divided into numerous races, which again are subdivided into numerous tribes, families, or sub-castes," and all these, he adds, "do not intermarry." In Japan, until three decades ago, social barriers as to marriage were rigidly enforced, and in China, to this day, slaves, boatmen, actors, policemen, can marry women of their own class only. Nor are these difficulties eliminated at once as we descend the ladder of civilization. In Brazil, Central America, in the Polynesian and other Pacific Islands and elsewhere we find such barriers to free marriage, and among the Malayan Hovas of Madagascar even the slaves are subdivided into three classes, which do not intermarry! It is only among those peoples which are too low to be able to experience sentimental love anyway that this formidable obstacle of class prejudice vanishes, while race and tribal hatred remain in full force.