Children constitute the surest cement against conjugal separations. With most savages the rejected wife regains not only her _dot_, but also part of the common property, or even the whole of it. On the contrary, the purchase value of the wife is only as a rule returned to the husband when sterility, adultery or other grave reasons are the causes of divorce. It results from this that divorce is always very rare among peoples where the women are very dear. The right of the children after divorce varies a good deal in different races; sometimes they are adjudged to the husband, sometimes to the wife. Divorced women often become prostitutes, for example, among the Chinese and Arabs. As a rule, marriages for love are more lasting than others, especially when the couple were acquainted before marriage. It is extremely probable that in primitive man marriage only lasted till the birth of a child, or at the most a few years. With civilization the duration of marriage has been prolonged, higher motives having become added to bodily charms, sexual appetite and the instinct of procreation, and tending toward more lasting unions. Moral reasons have given rise to laws of protection in marriage, but the mania which man possesses of dogmatizing on everything has often caused these laws to degenerate into abuse or religious absurdities. In this way the modern form of our Christian monogamy has been imposed by a tyrannical dogma of the Roman Church; a dogma which no doubt started from an ideal point of view, but fell into disuse in practice, owing to the fact that it did not take sufficient account of the natural conditions and sexual requirements of the race. This explains the present tendency to greater legal liberty, even when the moral causes which tend to render monogamous unions durable multiply with the progress of civilization. HISTORY OF EXTRA-CONJUGAL SEXUAL INTERCOURSE As monogamous marriage exists among the anthropoid apes, we have every reason to believe that it existed with primitive man. In neither case has it been the result of artificial laws, but the result of brute force and congenital instincts inherited by natural evolution. It often happened that one male vanquished another and took possession of the female, or wife, of the vanquished. Others abducted the female by surprise. Later on, marriage by exchange or by purchase, derived from marriage by rape, probably constituted the first stage toward a legal monogamous or polygamous union, as an element in the most primitive human conventional organizations. In this way we can imagine the main points of the prehistoric evolution of marriage.