As a matter of fact, many human races have practised, from the first, vices contrary to nature. The Kanaks of New Caledonia frequently assemble at night in a cabin to give themselves up to this kind of debauchery.[135] The New Zealanders practised it even among their women.[136] It was also a widely-spread custom throughout Polynesia, and even a special deity presided over it. In the whole of America, from north to south, similar customs have existed or still exist. We have previously seen that the Esquimaux reared young boys for this purpose. The Southern Californians did the same, and the Spanish missionaries, on their arrival in the country, found men dressed as women and assuming their part. They were trained to this from youth, and often publicly married to the chiefs.[137] Nero was evidently a mere plagiarist. The existence of analogous customs has been proved amongst the Guyacurus of La Plata, the natives of the Isthmus of Darien, the tribes of Louisiana, and the ancient Illinois, etc.[138] The two chief forms of sexual excess of which I have been speaking, unnatural vice and the debauchery of girls or free women, are habitual in savage countries; and later, when civilisation and morality have evolved, the same inveterate inclinations still persist for a long time, in spite of public opinion and even of legal repression. The Incas, according to the chronicler Garcilaso, were merciless in regard to these sexual aberrations, and the Mexican law was equally severe, but all without much effect, if we may believe the accounts of Garcilaso himself, Gomara, Bernal Diaz, etc. I have elsewhere related how the ancient legislations of the great Asiatic states repressed these base aberrations of the procreative sense, and nevertheless, at the present day, the Arabs frequently give way to them, even in the holy Mosque at Mecca;[139] and other Eastern peoples, Hindoos, Persians, and Chinese, are also very imperfectly reformed on this point. When we remember that morality is essentially relative, and that ancestral impressions are extremely tenacious in the human brain, we shall not be much surprised to see these low tendencies persist as survivals in the midst of civilisations already far advanced. Nevertheless, the theoretic morality of all the great nations of the East has for centuries condemned these repugnant excesses, which our European ancestors, both Celts and Teutons, have early reproved and repressed. It is all the more singular to find the most intelligent race of antiquity, the ancient Greeks, practising the greatest tolerance on this subject, so much so that the names of Socrates and Plato, those fathers of ethereal spiritualism, are attached to amours the mere thought of which now excites disgust in a civilised European.