The Eastern man rarely or never commits the sin of coveting his neighbour’s wife, because he rarely or never sees her, and so, at least, we cannot say that the unrighteous laws governing the relative positions of the sexes in the Orient, lead the men of the Orient into the worst of all temptations. Among the very poorest classes in Korea the men invariably see more or less of the women; but those men are too poor, too hard worked, too absorbed, body, brain, and heart, in a struggle for existence to covet other men’s wives, or, often indeed, to have wives of their own.
Oriental polygamy seems so delicate a subject, such thin conversational ice to the average Western mind, that the best informed writers are rather in the habit of skating about its edges and of speaking loosely and indefinitely, and with the greatest confusion about the wives and the concubines of the East. I have spoken of the well-to-do Korean as having a plurality of wives. This is not so. And that such a mis-statement has been made by writers of eminence, and ordinarily of great exactness, is no excuse for me. A Korean can have but one wife, one true and absolute wife, but (and here comes in the fact which is hard, very hard, of comprehension even to intelligent Europeans, who have not lived in the Orient) he may have as many concubines as he can afford, and their position, though not so high of rank, is as honourable, and as respectable as that of his wife. The word concubine, in the sense given it by our English dictionaries, can no more justly be applied to the women of a Korean’s seraglio than it can be applied to Hagar. I use the word, because it is the word used by all European scholars to indicate the women of whom I am writing, and is also the word used to designate them in the countries of the East. As I have said, they are not on a social equality with the wife, but they are, to the best of my belief, on a moral equality with her, both in the eyes of Oriental law and in the eyes of morality itself. I see no difference ethically between the woman who consents to marry (as every well-born Korean woman does consent to marry) a man who she knows has, or will have, a well filled harem—I see no difference between her and the woman who consents to make that harem her home.