human
cannot be used against their sex in Africa, for there it is the other way about, husbands having to purchase their wives. When a man has a wife bestowed upon him as an act of charity, he feels that she is not properly his own, and she, if she will, can treat him with contempt. This custom of wife-purchase, although it is to be decried as tending to lower marriage to the level of a commercial contract, is an incentive to young men to work. Lazy youths cannot compete with energetic ones in the matrimonial market, as they are despised by the young women and rejected by their parents as being unworthy of their daughters. The number of polygamists would also be greater were it not that each man has to buy his wife. In order to procure the wherewithal he must necessarily exert himself, and as