Speaking of the tribes who once inhabited the Adelaide Plains of South Australia, Mr. Edward Stephens, who went to Australia about half a century ago, remarks, “Those who speak of the natives as a naturally degraded race, either do not speak from experience, or they judge them by what they have become when the abuse of intoxicants and contact with the most wicked of the white race have begun their deadly work. As a rule, to which there are no exceptions, if a tribe of blacks is found away from the white settlement, the more vicious of the white men are most anxious to make the acquaintance of the natives, and that, too, solely for purposes of immorality.... I saw the natives and was much with them before those dreadful immoralities were well known, ... and I say it fearlessly, that nearly all their evils they owed to the white man’s immorality and to the white man’s drink.”[354] The Rev. J. Sibree tells us that, among most of the tribes of Madagascar, the unchastity of girls does not give umbrage. But “there are some other tribes,” he says, “more isolated, as certain of the eastern peoples, where a higher standard of morality prevails, girls being kept scrupulously from any intercourse with the other sex until they are married.”[355] Nowhere has chastity been more rigorously insisted upon than among the South Slavonians. A fallen girl among them has lost almost all chance of getting married. She is commonly despised and often punished in a very barbarous way; whilst, on the other hand, purity gives a girl a higher value than the greatest wealth. In some places, a father or a brother may even kill a man whom he finds with his daughter or sister. But Dr. Krauss assures us that this rigidity in their morals has gradually decreased, the more foreign civilization has got a footing among them.[356] Again, Professor Ahlqvist believes that illicit intercourse between the sexes was almost unknown among the ancient Finns, as the terms used by them with reference to such connections are borrowed from other languages.[357] And Professor Vámbéry makes the same observation as regards the primitive Turko-Tartars. “The difference in morality,” he says, “which exists between the Turks affected by a foreign civilization and kindred tribes inhabiting the steppes, becomes very conspicuous to any one living among the Turkomans and Kara-Kalpaks; for whether in Africa or Asia, certain vices are introduced only by the so-called bearers of culture.”[358]