Under these circumstances a male member of the dominant race may seduce the wife of a member of the subject race, or a daughter, without incurring any punishment except at the hands of the man wronged by him. Such a wrong-doer would not be indicted or tried for adultery or seduction, nor could the wronged husband or father recover from him damages in a suit at law, nor yet could a bastardy suit be brought by the girl against him with any show of success for the support of his child, were issue to be born to her from such illicit union. The men of the dominant race find themselves thus in a situation where the law, public opinion, provides for their exclusive possession the women of their own race, and permits them at the same time to share with the men of the subject race possession of the women of that race. The sexual activity of the men of the first class approaches in these conditions to a state of nature in respect to the women of the second class. They are enabled, therefore, to select wives from the stronger race, and mistresses from the weaker one. The natural law of sexual selection determines the mating in the one case as truly as in the other, _i. e._, in the case of concubinage as in that of marriage. The men of the upper class fall in love with the women whom they have elected to become their wives, they also fall in love with the women they have elected to become their concubines. They go through all those erotic attentions to the women of each class, which are called courtship in the language of sexual love. Only in the case of women of the first class this courtship is open, visible to the eye of the upper world of the dominant race, while in the case of the women of the second class it is secret, conducted in a corner of the lower world of the subject race.
These men build homes in the upper world where are installed their wives, who beget them children in lawful wedlock; they likewise build homes in the lower world, where are installed their concubines, who beget them children in unlawful wedlock. The wives move, have their being in the upper world and sustain to their husbands certain well-defined rights and relations, social and legal. The children of this union sustain to those fathers equally clear and definite rights and relations in the eye of the law, in the eye of society. The law, society, imposes on them, these husbands and fathers, certain well-defined duties and obligations in respect to these children, these wives, which may not be evaded or violated with impunity. These men cannot therefore disown or desert their wives and children at will. Whereas, such is not the case, is not the situation, in respect to the unlawful wives hidden away in a corner of the under-world, or of that of the children begotten to those men by these unlawful wives, but quite the contrary. For them the law, society, does not intervene, does not establish any binding relations, any reciprocal rights between those women and children and the men, any more than if the men and the women were living together in a state of nature and having children born to them in such a state, where the will of the natural man is law, where his sexual passion measures exactly the extent and the duration of his duties and obligations in respect to his offspring and the mother of them. When he grows weary of the mother he goes elsewhere, and forgets that he ever had children by her.