The Israelites, having vanquished the Midianites, killed all the men, according to the Semitic custom, and took away the cattle, the children, and the women.[230] But Moses, always directly inspired by the Lord, ordered them to put to death the women and even the male children, and to keep the young girls and virgins.[231] There were sixteen thousand maidens, of whom thirty-two were reserved for the Lord’s share, which doubtless means for the priests. Of the sheep, oxen, asses, and maidens that remained, Moses further deducted the fiftieth part, which he gave to the Levites of the tabernacle.[232] This ferocity and this coarse assimilation of captured women to cattle are not peculiar to the people of God, but prevailed amongst the primitive Arabs,[233] or rather amongst all the Semites, who were still savage or barbarous. Capture in war has, besides, been largely practised by all races and throughout the world. An old Irish poem, the “Duan Eiranash,” speaks of three hundred women carried off by the Picts from the Gaels, who, finding themselves thus deprived of their women by a single blow, allied themselves then with the Irish. I will confine myself to these examples, gleaned from all parts, and which it would be easy to multiply. They amply suffice to establish that in primitive societies woman, being held in very low esteem, is absolutely reduced to the level of chattels and of domestic animals; that she represents a booty like any other; that her master can use and abuse her without fear. But in these bestial practices there is nothing which approaches, even distantly, to marriage, and we are not in the least warranted to call these brutal rapes marriages. Even in the countries where a true marriage exists, the customs and the laws tolerate for a long time the introduction into the house of the husband of captured slaves, who are treated by the master as concubines by the side of the legitimate wife or wives. The heroes of Homer profit largely by this legal tolerance, and when the Clytemnestra of Æschylus justifies herself for having killed her husband, she alleges, among other extenuating circumstances, the intimacy of Agamemnon with his slave Cassandra. Assuredly in all this there is no marriage. We shall presently see that in many countries the concubinate, legal and patent, has co-existed, or co-exists, by the side of marriage without being confounded with it. It is important to reserve the name of _marriage by capture_ to legal and pacific marriage, in the ceremonial of which we find practices recalling or simulating by survival the primitive rape of woman. II. _Marriage by Capture._