In Tasmania and Australia the women were, or are, considered as the property of the men. We have seen that in these countries there is no care for decency or chastity, and that wives are often obtained by brutal rape. Their proprietors also make no scruple of letting them out, lending them, or bartering them; they have the fullest right to use or abuse them. The Tasmanians felt very honoured if a white man borrowed their wives, but they none the less chastised, and very cruelly too, unauthorised infidelities, on the simple ground, as their panegyrist, the Rev. Bonwick, tells us, of their right of ownership.[626] In certain Australian tribes, organised in classes, the women were reputed common to all the individuals of the same class, but all intimate relation with a man of another group was a most grave adultery for both the guilty ones--a social adultery.[627] In the greater number of New Caledonian tribes the punishment of adultery is left to the care of the injured husband, who kills the thief, if he can, but often contents himself with giving a severe punishment to his wife, sometimes inflicting a sort of scalping. At Kanala, however, adultery has already become a social crime. The man who commits it is led before the chief, judged by the council of elders whom the chief presides over, and executed on the spot.[628] But in one way or another, whether he incurs the social vengeance or that of the offended one--the robbed one, rather--and of his relatives, the New Caledonian who commits adultery risks his life. Sometimes, however, he can get off by paying a fine, after the old German fashion. Often also, in case of adultery committed by a married man, the New Caledonians practise a singular retaliation: the adult men of the village simply violate the wife of the delinquent.[629] The wives of the chiefs being much more sacred than the others, the slightest attempt on the rights of their proprietors risks being cruelly punished. M. Moncelon has seen a man condemned to death merely for having looked at the wife of the chief while she was picking up shells;[630] it was regarded as treason. This ferocity in the repression of adultery is not at all special to Melanesia. With some variations, it is found in all times and in all countries. It is worthy of remark also that even when the adulterous man is punished, it is simply because he has robbed another husband, and not because he has failed in conjugal faith. III. _Adultery in Black Africa._