Nay, incredible cases are related of
fathers being sold as slaves, or killed. The African missionary,
Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to die
within an enclosure. He asked her why she had been thus deserted, and
she replied:
"I am old, you see, and no longer able to serve them [her
grown children]. When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid
in carrying home the flesh; I am incapable of gathering wood
to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back
as I used to do."
V. MASCULINE SELFISHNESS
The South American Chiquitos, as Dobrizhoffer informs us (II., 264),
used to kill the wife of a sick man, believing her to be the cause of
his illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow her
disappearance. Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives,
when they had no other use for them. Carl Bock (275) says of the
Malays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make the
women their beasts of burden (as the lower races do in general).
"I have," he says,
"continually met a file of women carrying loads of rice or
coffee on their heads, while the men would follow, lazily
lounging along, with a long stick in their hands, like
shepherds driving a flock of sheep.... I have seen a man go
into his house, where his wife was lying asleep on the bed,
rudely awake her, and order her to lie on the floor, while
he made himself comfortable on the cushions.
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