"Marriages are made in heaven," says the old proverb, and among some primitive peoples we meet with numerous instances of their having been agreed upon and arranged by prospective parents long before the birth of their offspring. Indeed, the betrothal of unborn children by their parents occurs sporadically to-day in civilized lands. Ploss has called attention to child-marriages in their sociological and physiological bearings (125.1. 386-402), and Post has considered the subject in his historical study of family law. In these authorities the details of the subject may be read. In Old Calabar, men who already possess several wives take to their bosom and kiss, as their new wife, babes two or three weeks old. In China, Gujurat, Ceylon, and parts of Brazil, wives of from four to six years of age are occasionally met with. In many parts of the world wives of seven to nine years of age are common, and wives of from ten to twelve very common. In China it is sometimes the case that parents buy for their infant son an infant wife, nursed at the same breast with him (234. xlii.). Wiedemann, in an article on child-marriages in Egypt (381), mentions the fact that a certain king of the twenty-first dynasty (about 1100 B.C.) seems to have had as one of his wives a child only a few days old. From Dio Cassius we learn that in Rome, at the beginning of the Empire, marriages of children under ten years occasionally took place.
In some parts of the world the child-wife does not belong to her child-husband. "Among the Reddies, of India," Letourneau informs us, "a girl from sixteen to twenty years of age is married to a boy of five or six. The wife then becomes the real wife of the boy's uncle, or cousin, or of the father of the reputed husband. But the latter is considered to be the legal father of the children of his pretended wife." So it is only when the boy has grown up that he receives his wife, and he, in turn, acts as his relative before him (100. 354). Temple cites the following curious custom in his tales of the Panjâb (542. I. xviii.):-- "When Raja Vasali has won a bride from Raja Sirkap, he is given a new-born infant and a mango-tree, which is to flower in twelve years, and when it flowers, the girl is to be his wife." The age prescribed by ancient Hindu custom (for the Brahman, Tshetria, and Vysia classes) is six to eight years for the girl, and the belief prevailed that if a girl were to attain her puberty before being married, her parents and brothers go to hell, as it was their duty to have got her married before that period (317. 56). Father Sangermano, writing of Burma a hundred years ago, notices the "habit of the Burmese to engage their daughters while young, in real or fictitious marriages, in order to save them from the hands of the king's ministers, custom having established a rule, which is rarely if ever violated, that no married woman can be seized, even for the king himself" (234. xlii.). The child-marriages of India have been a fruitful theme for discussion, as well as the enforced widowhood consequent upon the death of the husband. Among the most interesting literature on the subject are the "Papers relating to Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India" (317), Schlagintweit (142), etc. The evils connected with the child-marriages of India are forcibly brought out by Mrs. Steel in several of the short stories in her _From the Five Rivers_ (1893), and by Richard Garbe in his beautiful little novel _The Redemption of the Brahman_(1894).