age ceremonies;
since temples, tanks, and groves secured esteem in this life, and
promised some advantage in the next, and an outlay in such works
might therefore have been preferred. But under such governments a
man's title even to the exclusive possession of his wife might not be
considered as altogether secure under the mere sanction of religion;
and the outlay in feeding the family, tribe, and neighbourhood during
the marriage ceremony seems to have been considered as a kind of
value in exchange given for her to society. There is nothing that she
and her husband recollect through life with so much pride and
pleasure as the cost of their marriage, if it happen to be large for
their condition of life; it is their _amoka_, their title of
nobility;[3] and their parents consider it their duty to make it as
large as they can. A man would hardly feel secure of the sympathy of
his family, tribe, circle of society, or rulers, for the loss of 'his
ox, or his ass, or anything that is his', if it should happen to have
cost him nothing; and, till he could feel secure of their sympathy
for the loss, he would not feel very secure in the possession. He,
therefore, or those who are interested in his welfare, strengthen his
security by an outlay which invests his wife with a tangible value in
cost, well understood by his circle and rulers. His family, tribe,
and circle have received the purchase money, and feel bound to secure
to him the commodity purchased; and, as they are in all such matters
commonly much stronger than the rulers themselves, the money spent
among them is more efficacious in securing the exclusive enjoyment of
the wife than if it had been paid in taxes or fees to them for a
marriage licence.[4] The pride of families and tribes, and the desire
of the multitude to participate in the enjoyment of such ceremonies,
tend to keep up this usage after the cause in which it originated may
have ceased to operate; but it will, it is to be hoped, gradually
decline with the increased feeling of security to person, property,
and character under our rule. Nothing is now more common than to see
an individual in the humblest rank spending all that he has, or can
borrow, in the marriage of one of many daughters, and trusting to
Providence for the means of marrying the others; nor in the higher,
to find a young man, whose estates have, during a long minority,
under the careful management of Government officers, been freed from
very he