CHAPTER VIII

CANNIBALISM

338. Cannibalism. Cannibalism is one of the primordial mores. It dates from the earliest known existence of man on earth. It may reasonably be believed to be a custom which all peoples have practiced.1039 Only on the pastoral stage has it ceased, where the flesh of beasts was common and abundant.1040 It is indeed noticeable that the pygmies of Africa and the Kubus of Sumatra, two of the lowest outcast races, do not practice cannibalism,1041 although their superior neighbors do. Our intense abomination for cannibalism is a food taboo (secs. 353-354), and is perhaps the strongest taboo which we have inherited.

339. Origin in food supply. It is the best opinion that cannibalism originated in the defects of the food supply, more specifically in the lack of meat food. The often repeated objection that New Zealanders and others have practiced cannibalism when they had an abundant supply of meat food is not to the point. The passion for meat food, especially among people who have to live on heavy starch food, is very strong. Hence they eat worms, insects, and offal. It is also asserted that the appetite for human flesh, when eating it has become habitual, becomes a passion. When salt is not to be had the passion for meat reaches its highest intensity. "When tribes [of Australians] assembled to eat the fruit of the bunya-bunya they were not permitted to kill any game [in the district where the trees grow], and at length the craving for flesh was so intense that they were impelled to kill one of their number, in order that their appetites might be satisfied."1042 It follows that when this custom has become traditional the present food supply may have little effect on it. There are cases at the present time in which the practice of using human flesh for food is customary on a large and systematic scale. On the island of New Britain human flesh is sold in shops as butcher's meat is sold amongst us.1043 In at least some of the Solomon Islands human victims (preferably women) are fattened for a feast, like pigs.1044 Lloyd1045 describes the cannibalism of the Bangwa as an everyday affair, although they eat chiefly enemies, and rarely a woman. The women share the feast, sitting by themselves. He says that it is, no doubt, "a depraved appetite." They are not at all ashamed of it. Physically the men are very fine. "The cannibalism of the Monbutto is unsurpassed by any nation in the world."1046 Amongst them human flesh is sold as if it were a staple article of food. They are "a noble race." They have national pride, intellectual power, and good judgment. They are orderly, friendly, and have a stable national life.1047 Ward1048 describes the cannibalism on the great bend of the Congo as due to a relish for the kind of food. "Originating, apparently, from stress of adverse circumstances, it has become an acquired taste, the indulgence of which has created a peculiar form of mental disorder, with lack of feeling, love of fighting, cruelty, and general human degeneracy, as prominent attributes." An organized traffic in human beings for food exists on the upper waters of the Congo. It is thought that the pygmy tribe of the Wambutti are not cannibals because they are too "low," and because they do not file the lower incisors. The latter custom goes with cannibalism in the Congo region, and is also characteristic of the more gifted, beautiful, and alert tribes.1049 None of the coast tribes of West Africa eat human flesh, but the interior tribes eat any corpse regardless of the cause of death. Families hesitate to eat their own dead, but they sell or exchange them for the dead of other families.1050 In the whole Congo region the custom exists, especially amongst the warlike tribes, who eat not only war captives but slaves.1051

It is noteworthy that a fork1052 was invented in Polynesia for this kind of food, long before the fork was used for any other.

340. Cannibalism not abominable. Spix and Martius1053 asked a chief of the Miranhas why his people practiced cannibalism. The chief showed that it was entirely a new fact to him that some people thought it an abominable custom. "You whites," said he, "will not eat crocodiles or apes, although they taste well. If you did not have so many pigs and crabs you would eat crocodiles and apes, for hunger hurts. It is all a matter of habit. When I have killed an enemy it is better to eat him than to let him go to waste. Big game is rare because it does not lay eggs like turtles. The bad thing is not being eaten, but death, if I am slain, whether our tribal enemy eats me or not. I know of no game which tastes better than men. You whites are really too dainty."

343. Judicial cannibalism. Another use of cannibalism in the in-group is to annihilate one who has broken an important taboo. The notion is frequently met with, amongst nature peoples, that a ghost can be got rid of by utterly annihilating the corpse, e.g. by fire. Judicial cannibalism destroys it, and the members of the group by this act participate in a ritual, or sacramental ceremony, by which a criminal is completely annihilated. Perhaps there may also be the idea of collective responsibility for his annihilation. To take the life of a tribe comrade was for a long time an act which needed high motive and authority and required expiation. The ritual of execution was like the ritual of sacrifice. In the Hebrew law some culprits were to be stoned by the whole congregation. Every one must take a share in the great act. The blood guilt, if there was any, must be incurred by all.1070 Primitive taboos are put on acts which offend the ghosts and may, therefore, bring woe on the whole group. Any one who breaks a taboo commits a sin and a crime, and excites the wrath of the superior powers. Therefore he draws on himself the fear and horror of his comrades. They must extrude him by banishment or death. They want to dissociate themselves from him. They sacrifice him to the powers which he has offended. When his comrades eat his corpse they perform a duty. They annihilate him and his soul completely.

346. Cannibalism to cure disease. Notions that the parts of the human body will cure different diseases are only variants of the notion of getting courage and skill by eating the same. Cases are recorded in which a man gave parts of his body to be eaten by the sick out of love and devotion.1084

347. Reversions to cannibalism. When savage and brutal emotions are stirred, in higher civilization, by war and quarrels, the cannibalistic disposition is developed again. Achilles told Hector that he wished he could eat him. Hekuba expressed a wish that she could devour the liver of Achilles.1085 In 1564 the Turks executed Vishnevitzky, a brave Polish soldier who had made them much trouble. They ate his heart.1086 Dozy1087 mentions a case at Elvira, in 890, in which women cast themselves on the corpse of a chief who had caused the death of their relatives, cut it in pieces, and ate it. The same author relates1088 that Hind, the mother of Moavia, made for herself a necklace and bracelets of the noses and ears of Moslems killed at Ohod, and also that she cut open the corpse of an uncle of Mohammed, tore out the liver, and ate a piece of it. It is related of an Irish chief, of the twelfth century, that when his soldiers brought to him the head of a man whom he hated "he tore the nostrils and lips with his teeth, in a most savage and inhuman manner."1089

348. In famine. Reversion to cannibalism under a total lack of other food ought not to be noted. We have some historical cases, however, in which during famine people became so familiarized with cannibalism that their horror of it was overcome. Abdallatif1090 mentions a great famine in Egypt in the year 1200, due to a failure of the inundation of the Nile. Resort was had to cannibalism to escape death. At first the civil authorities burned alive those who were detected, being moved by astonishment and horror. Later, those sentiments were not aroused. "Men were seen to make ordinary meals of human flesh, to use it as a dainty, and to lay up provision of it.... The usage, having been introduced, spread to all the provinces. Then it ceased to cause surprise.... People talked of it as an ordinary and indifferent thing. This indifference was due to habit and familiarity." This case shows that the horror of cannibalism is due to tradition in the mores. Diodorus says that the ancient Egyptians, during a famine, ate each other rather than any animal which they considered sacred.1091

349. Cannibalism and ghost fear. Human sacrifice and cannibalism are not necessarily conjoined. Often it seems as if they once were so, but have been separated.1092 Whatever men want ghosts want. If the former are cannibals, the latter will be the same. Often the notion is that the gods eat the souls. In this view, the men eat the flesh of sacrificed beasts and sacrifice the blood, in which is the life or soul, to the gods. This the Jews did. They also burned the kidneys, the fat of the kidneys, and the liver, which they thought to be the seat of life. These they might not eat.1093 When men change, the gods do not. Hence the rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism continue in religion long after they disappear from the mores, in spite of loathing. Loathing is a part of the sacrifice.1094 The self-control and self-subjugation enter into the sacrament. All who participate, in religion, in an act which gravely affects the imagination as horrible and revolting enter into a communion with each other. Every one who desires to participate in the good to be obtained must share in the act. As we have seen above, all must participate that none may be in a position to reproach the rest. Under this view, the cannibal food is reduced to a crumb, or to a drop of blood, which may be mixed with other food. Still later, the cannibal food is only represented, e.g. by cakes in the human form, etc. In the Middle Ages the popular imagination saw a human body in the host, and conjured up operations on the host which were attributed to sorcerers and Jews, which would only be applicable to a human body. Then the New Testament language about the body and blood of Christ took on a realistic sense which was cannibalistic.

351. Cult and cannibalism. The cases which have been cited show how cult kept up cannibalism, if no beast was substituted. Also, a great number of uses of blood and superstitions about blood appear to be survivals of cannibalism or deductions from it. The same may be said of holiday cakes of special shapes, made by peasants, which have long lost all known sense. In one part of France the last of the harvest which is brought in is made into a loaf in human shape, supposed to represent the spirit of corn or of fertility. It is broken up and distributed amongst all the villagers, who eat it.1104

A Mongolian lama reported of a tribe, the Lhopa of Sikkim or Bhutan, that they kill and eat the bride's mother at a wedding, if they can catch no wild man.1105

352. A burglar in West Prussia, in 1865, killed a maid-servant and cut flesh from her body out of which to make a candle for use in later acts of theft. He was caught while committing another burglary. He confessed that he ate a part of the corpse of his first-mentioned victim "in order to appease his conscience."1106

353. Food taboos. It is most probable that dislike to eat the human body was a product of custom, and grew in the mores after other foods became available in abundance. Unusual foods now cost us an effort. Frogs' legs, for instance, repel most people at first. We eat what we learned from our parents to eat, and other foods are adopted by "acquired taste." Light is thrown on the degree to which all food preferences and taboos are a part of the mores by a comparison of some cases of food taboos. Porphyrius, a Christian of Tyre, who lived in the second half of the second century of the Christian era, says that a Phœnician or an Egyptian would sooner eat man's flesh than cow's flesh.1107 A Jew would not eat swine's flesh. A Zoroastrian could not conceive it possible that any one could eat dog's flesh. We do not eat dog's flesh, probably for the same reason that we do not eat cat's or horse's, because the flesh is tough or insipid and we can get better, but some North American Indians thought dog's flesh the very best food. The Banziris, in the French Congo, reserved dog's flesh for men, and they surround meals of it with a solemn ritual. A man must not touch his wife with his finger for a day after such a feast.1108 The inhabitants of Ponape will eat no eels, which "they hold in the greatest horror." The word used by them for eel means "the dreadful one."1109 Dyaks eat snakes, but reject eels.1110 Some Melanesians will not eat eels because they think that there are ghosts in them.1111 South African Bantus abominate fish.1112 Some Canary Islanders ate no fish.1113 Tasmanians would rather starve than eat fish.1114 The Somali will eat no fish, considering it disgraceful to do so.1115 They also reject game and birds.1116 These people who reject eels and fish renounce a food supply which is abundant in their habitat.

356. Philosophy of cannibalism. If cannibalism began in the interest of the food supply, especially of meat, the wide ramifications of its relations are easily understood. While men were unable to cope with the great beasts cannibalism was a leading feature of social life, around which a great cluster of interests centered. Ideas were cultivated by it, and it became regulative and directive as to what ought to be done. The sentiments of kinship made it seem right and true that the nearest relatives should be eaten. Further deductions followed, of which the cases given are illustrations. As to enemies, the contrary sentiments found place in connection with it. It combined directly with ghost fear. The sacramental notion seems born of it. When the chase was sufficiently developed to give better food the taboo on human flesh seemed no more irrational than the other food taboos above mentioned. Swans and peacocks were regarded as great dainties in the Middle Ages. We no longer eat them. Snakes are said to be good eating, but most of us would find it hard to eat them. Yet why should they be more loathsome than frogs or eels? Shipwrecked people, or besieged and famine-stricken people, have overcome the loathing for human flesh rather than die. Others have died because they could not overcome it, and have thus rendered the strongest testimony to the power of the mores. In general, the cases show that if men are hungry enough, or angry enough, they may return to cannibalism now. Our horror of cannibalism is due to a long and broad tradition, broken only by hearsay of some far-distant and extremely savage people who now practice it. Probably the popular opinion about it is that it is wicked. It is not forbidden by the rules of any religion, because it had been thrown out of the mores before any "religion" was founded.

CHAPTER IX

SEX MORES

357. Meaning of sex mores. The sex mores are one of the greatest and most important divisions of the mores. They cover the relations of men and women to each other before marriage and in marriage, with all the rights and duties of married and unmarried respectively to the rest of the society. The mores determine what marriage shall be, who may enter into it, in what way they may enter into it, divorce, and all details of proper conduct in the family relation. In regard to all these matters it is evident that custom governs and prescribes. When positive institutions and laws are made they always take up, ordain, and regulate what the mores have long previously made facts in the social order. In the administration of law also, especially by juries, domestic relations are controlled by the mores. The decisions rendered by judges utter in dogmatic or sententious form the current notions of truth and right about those relations. Our terms "endogamy," "mother family," "polyandry," etc., are only descriptive terms for a summary of the folkways which have been established in different groups and which are capable of classification.

358. The sex difference. The economy and advantage of sex differentiation are primarily physical. "As structural complexity increases, the female generative system becomes more and more complex. All this involves a great expenditure of energy, and we can clearly see how an ovum-producing organism would benefit by being spared the additional effort required for seeking out and impregnating another organism, and how, on the other hand, organisms whose main reproductive feature is simply the production of spermatozoa would be better fitted for the work of search and impregnation if unhampered by a cumbersome female generative system. Hence the advantage of the sexes being separate."1129 Here we have the reason why the sexes are independent and complementary, but why "equality" can never be predicated of them. Power in the family, in industry, in civil affairs, war, and religion is not the same thing and cannot be. Each sex has more power for one domain, and must have less power for another. Equality is an incongruous predicate. "Under the influence of the law of battle the male has become more courageous, powerful, and pugnacious than the female.... So, too, the male has, in the struggle, often acquired great beauty, success on his part depending largely, in many cases, upon the choice of the females who are supposed to select the most beautiful mates. This is thought to be notably the case with birds."1130 In some few cases the female seeks the male, as in certain species of birds. Some male fish look after the eggs, and many cock-birds help to build the nest, hatch the eggs, and tend the young.1131 When the females compete for the males the female is "endowed with all the secondary characters of the polygamous male; she is the more beautiful, the more courageous, the more pugnacious." This seems to show that the secondary characters are due to sex selection.1132 Men are held to be polygamous by descent and in their "instincts as at present developed." "The instinct for promiscuous intercourse is much stronger among men than women, and unquestionably the husband is much more frequently all in all to the wife than she to him."1133

359. Sex difference and evolution. According to the current applications of the evolution philosophy it is argued that "inheritable characters peculiar to one sex show a tendency to be inherited chiefly or solely by that sex in the offspring."1134 Women are said to be mentally more adaptable.1135 This is shown in their tact, which is regarded as a product of their desire to adapt themselves to the stronger sex, with whose muscular strength they cannot cope. If a woman should resist her husband she would provoke him, and her life would be endangered. Passive and resigned women would survive. "Here at any rate we may have one of the reasons why women are more passive and resigned than men."1136 Their tact is attributed to their quicker perception and to their lack of egoism. "The man, being more self-absorbed than the woman, is often less alive than she to what is going on around."1137 The man has a more stable nervous system than the woman. Combativeness and courage produce that stability; emotional development is antagonistic to it. "In proportion as the emotions are brought under intellectual control, in that proportion, other things being equal, will the nervous system become more stable."1138 Ages of subjection are also said to have produced in women a sense of dependence. Resignation and endurance are two of women's chief characteristics. "They have been educated in her from the remotest times."1139 Throughout the animal kingdom males are more variable than females. Man varies through a wider scale than woman. Dwarfs and giants, geniuses and idiots, are more common amongst men than amongst women.1140 Women use less philosophy; they do not think things out in their relations and analysis as men do. Miss Kingsley said that she "had met many African men who were philosophers, thinking in the terms of fetich, but never a woman so doing."1141

On the facts of observation here enumerated nearly all will agree. The traits are certainly handed down by tradition and education. Whether they are evolutionary is far more doubtful. They are thought to be such by virtue of applications of some generalizations of evolutionary philosophy whose correctness, and whose application to this domain, have never been proved.

360. The sex distinction; family institution; marriage in the mores. The division of the human race into two sexes is the most important of all anthropological facts. The sexes differ so much in structure and function, and consequently in traits of feeling and character, that their interests are antagonistic. At the same time they are, in regard to reproduction, complementary. There is nothing in the sex relation, or in procreation, to bring about any continuing relation between a man and a woman. It is the care and education of children which first calls for such a continuing relation. The continuing relation is not therefore "in nature." It is institutional and conventional. A man and a woman were brought together, probably against their will, by a higher interest in the struggle for existence. The woman with a child needed the union more, and probably she was more unwilling to enter it. It is almost impossible to find a case of a group in which marriage does not exist, and in which the sex relation is one of true promiscuity. We are told that there is no family institution amongst the Bako, dwarfs in Kamerun. They obey animal instincts without restriction.1142 This means that the origin of the family institution lies in the period before any group formations now open to our study, and promiscuity is an inference as to what preceded what we can find. A woman with a child entered into an arrangement with a man, whether the father or not was immaterial, by which they carried on the struggle for existence together. The arrangement must have afforded advantages to both. It was produced by an agreement. The family institution resulted and became customary by imitation. Marriage was the form of agreement between the man and the woman by which they entered into the family institution. In the most primitive form of life known to us (Australians and Bushmen) the man roams abroad in search of meat food. His wife or wives stay by the fire at a trysting place, care for the children, and collect plant food. Thus the combination comes under the form of antagonistic coöperation. It presents us the germ of the industrial organization. It is a product of the folkways, being the resultant custom which arises, in time, out of the ways of satisfying interests which separate individuals, or pairs, invent and try. It follows that marriage in all its forms is in the mores of the time and place.

361. Regulation is conventional, not natural. The sex passion affects the weal or woe of human beings far more than hunger, vanity, or ghost fear. It has far more complications with other interests than the other great motives. There is no escaping the good and ill, the pleasure and pain, which inhere in it. It has two opposite extremes,—renunciation and license. In neither one of these can peace and satisfaction be found, or escape from the irritation of antagonistic impulses. There is no ground at all for the opinion that "nature" gave men an appetite the satisfaction of which would be peaceful and satisfactory, but that human laws and institutions have put it under constraints which produce agony.1143 The truth is that license stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony. Renunciation produces agony of another kind. Somewhere between lies temperance, which seems an easy solution, but there is no definition of temperance which is generally applicable, and, wherever the limit may be set, there, on either side of it, the antagonistic impulses appear again,—one of indulgence, the other of restraint,—producing pitfalls of vice and ruin, and ever renewing the strain and torment of the problem of right and duty. Therefore regulation is imperatively called for by the facts of "nature," and the regulation must come from intelligence and judgment. No determination of what the regulation should be has ever yet been found in law or ethics which does not bear harshly on great numbers, and in all stages of civilization numbers are found who violate the regulations and live outside of them.

362. Egoistic and altruistic elements. Here, then, is the case: the perpetuation of the species requires the coöperation of two complementary sexes. The sex relation is antagonistic to the struggle for existence, and so arouses egoistic sentiments and motives, while it is itself very egoistic. It is sometimes said that the struggle for existence is egoistic and reproduction altruistic, but this view rests upon a very imperfect analysis. It means that a man who has won food may eat it by himself, while reproduction assumes the coöperation of others. So far, well; but the struggle for existence assumes and demands co-operation in the food quest and a sharing of the product in all but a very small class of primitive cases; and the sex passion is purely egoistic, except in a very small class of cases of high refinement, the actuality of which may even be questioned. The altruistic element in reproduction belongs to the mores, and is due to life with children, affection for them, with sacrifice and devotion to them, as results produced by experience. It is clear that a division between the food quest as egoistic and reproduction as altruistic cannot be made the basis of ethical constructions. To get the good and avoid the ill there is required a high play of intelligence, good sense, and of all altruistic virtues. Under such a play of interests and feelings, from which no one is exempt, mass phenomena are produced by the ways of solving the problem which individuals and pairs hit upon. The wide range and contradictoriness of the folkways in regard to family life show how helpless and instinctive the struggle to solve the problem has been. Our own society shows how far we still are from a thorough understanding of the problem and from a satisfactory solution of it. It must be added that the ruling elements in different societies have molded the folkways to suit their own interests, and thus they have disturbed and confused the process of making folkways, and have spoiled the result.

363. Primary definition of marriage; taboos and conventionalization. The definition of marriage consists in stating what, at any time and place, the mores have imposed as regulations on the relations of a man and woman who are coöperatively carrying on the struggle for existence and the reproduction of the species. The regulations are always a conventionalization which sets the terms, modes, and conditions under which a pair may cohabit. It is, therefore, impossible to formulate a definition of marriage which will cover all forms of it throughout the history of civilization. In all lower civilization it is a tie of a woman to a man for the interests of both (or of the man). It follows that the sex relation has been a great arena for the use and perfection of the mores, since personal experience and reflection never ceased, and a great school for the education of the race in the use of intelligence, the development of sympathetic sentiments, and in a sense of the utility of ethical regulations. The sex taboo is the set of inhibitions which control and restrain the intercourse of the sexes with each other in ordinary life. At the present time, in civilized countries, that intercourse is limited by taboo, not by law. The nature and degree of the taboo are in the mores. Spanish, French, English, and American women, in the order named, are under less and less strict limitations in regard to ordinary social intercourse with men. The sex taboo could, therefore, be easily pursued and described through the whole history of civilization and amongst all nations. It seems to be arbitrary, although no doubt it has always been due, in its origin, to correct or incorrect judgments of conditions and interests. It is always conventional. That it has been and is recognized is the sum of its justification. When Augustine met the objection that Jacob had four wives he replied that that was no crime, because it was under the custom (mos) of Jacob's time.1144 This was a complete answer, but it was an appeal to the supreme authority of the mores.

364. Family, not marriage, is the institution. Although we speak of marriage as an institution, it is only an imperfect one. It has no structure. The family is the institution, and it was antecedent to marriage. Marriage has always been an elastic and variable usage, as it now is. Each pair, or other marital combination, has always chosen its own "ways" of living within the limits set by the mores. In fact the use of language reflects the vagueness of marriage, for we use the word "marriage" for wedding, nuptials, or matrimony (wedlock). Only the last could be an institution. Wedlock has gone through very many phases, and has by no means evolved along lines of harmonious and advancing development. In the earliest forms of the higher civilization, in Chaldea and Egypt, man and wife were, during wedlock, in a relation of rational free coöperation. Out of this two different forms of wedlock have come, the harem system and pair marriage. The historical sequences by which the former has been produced could be traced just as easily as those which have led up to the latter. There is no more necessity in one than in the other. Wedlock is a mode of associated life. It is as variable as circumstances, interests, and character make it within the conditions. No rules or laws can control it. They only affect the condition against which the individuals react. No laws can do more than specify ways of entering into wedlock, and the rights and duties of the parties in wedlock to each other, which the society will enforce. These, however, are but indifferent externals. All the intimate daily play of interests, emotions, character, taste, etc., are beyond the reach of the bystanders, and that play is what makes wedlock what it is for every pair. Nevertheless the relations of the parties are always deeply controlled by the current opinions in the society, the prevalent ethical standards, the approval or condemnation passed by the bystanders on cases between husbands and wives, and by the precepts and traditions of the old. Thus the mores hold control over individual taste and caprice, and individual experience reacts against the control. All the problems of marriage are in the intimate relations. When they affect large numbers they are brought under the solution of the mores. Therefore the history of marriage is to be interpreted by the mores, and its philosophy must be sought in the fact that it is an ever-moving product of the mores.

365. Endogamy and exogamy. Although it seems, at first consideration, that savages could not have perceived the alleged evils of inbreeding, yet a full examination of the facts is convincing that they did do so. In like manner, they were led to try to avert overpopulation by folkways. They acted "instinctively," or automatically, not rationally. Inbreeding preserves a type but weakens the stock. Outbreeding strengthens the stock but loses the type. In our own mores each one is forbidden to marry within a certain circle or outside of another circle. The first is the consanguine group of first cousins and nearer. The latter is the race to which we belong. Royal and noble castes are more strictly limited within the caste. Amongst savage peoples there were two ideas which were in conflict: (1) all the women of a group were regarded as belonging to all the men of that group; (2) a wife conquered abroad was a possession and a trophy. Endogamy and exogamy are forms of the mores in which one of these policies has been adopted to the exclusion of the other. Of that we have an example in civilized society, where royal persons, in order to find fitting mates, marry cousins, or uncles, or nieces, and bring on the family the evils of close inbreeding (Spain); or they take slave women as wives and breed out the blood of their race (Athenians, Arabs). The due adjustment of inbreeding and outbreeding is always a difficult problem of policy for breeders of animals. It is the same for men. The social interests favor inbreeding, by which property is united or saved from dispersion, and close relationship seems to assure acquaintance. At Venice, in the time of glory and luxury, great dowers seemed to threaten to dissipate great family fortunes. It became the custom to contract marriages only between families which could give as much as they got. "This was not the least of the causes of the moral and physical decline of the Venetian aristocracy."1145

366. Polygamy and polyandry. Polygamy and polyandry are two cases of family organization which are expedient under certain life conditions, and which came into existence or became obsolete according to changes in the life conditions, although there are also cases of survival, due to persistence of the mores, after the life conditions have so changed that the custom has become harmful. Population, so far as we know, normally contains equal numbers of the two sexes, except that there are periods in which, for some unknown reason, births of one sex greatly preponderate over those of the other.1146 There are also groups in which the food quest, or other duty, of the men is such that many lives are lost and so the adults of the two sexes are unequal in number.1147 Therefore, in a normal population, polygamy would compel many men, and polyandry many women, to remain unmarried. Polyandry might then be supplemented by female infanticide. That any persons in a primitive society should be destined to celibacy is so arbitrary and strange an arrangement that strong motives for it must be found in the life conditions. Two forms of polygamy must be distinguished. (a) In primitive society women are laborers, and the industrial system is often such that there is an economic advantage in having a number of women to one man. In those cases polygamy becomes interwoven with the whole social and political system. Other customs will also affect the expediency of polygamy. Every well-to-do man of the Bassari, in Togo, has three wives, because children are suckled for three years.1148 (b) In higher civilization, with surplus wealth, polygamy is an affair of luxury, sensuality, and ostentation. It is only in the former case that polygamy is socially expedient, and that women welcome more wives to help do the work and do not quarrel with each other. In the latter case, polygamy is an aberration of the mores, due to selfish force. There are very many examples of polygamy in which the two motives are combined. These are transition stages. Polyandry is due to a hard struggle for existence or to a policy of not dividing property. A Spartan who had a land allotment was forced to marry. His younger brothers lived with him and sometimes were also husbands to his wife. Wives were also lent out of friendship or in order to get vigorous offspring.1149 Here state policy or the assumed advantage of physical vigor overrode the motives of monogamy which prevailed in the surrounding civilization. In Plautus's comedy Stichus a case is referred to in which two slaves have one woman (wife). Roman epitaphs are cited in which two men jointly celebrate a common wife.1150 These are cases of return to an abandoned usage, under the stress of poverty. An emigrating group must generally have contained more men than women. Polyandry was very sure to occur. It is said that immigrant groups can be found in the United States in which polyandry exists, being produced in this way. Many aboriginal tribes in India, amongst which the Todas are the best known, practice polyandry. Przewalsky says that in Tibet polyandry is attributed to a tax on houses in which there is a married woman.1151 Primarily it is due to poverty and a hard habitat. Two, three, or even four brothers have a wife in common. The Russian traveler adds that rich men have a wife each, or even two, and Cunningham1152 confirms this; that is to say, then, that the number of wives follows directly the economic power of the man. The case only illustrates the close interdependence of capital and marriage which we shall find at every stage. In the days of Venetian glory "often four or five men united to maintain one woman, in whose house they met daily to laugh, eat, and jest, without a shadow of jealousy. If, however, the cleverness of a woman brought a young patrician into a mesalliance, the state promptly dissolved the bond in its own way."1153 The polyandry of the Nairs, on the Malabar coast, has been cited to prove that polyandry is not due to poverty. It is due to the unwillingness to subdivide the property of the family, which is of the modified mother-family form, all the immediate kin holding together and keeping the property undivided. Subdivisions of this people differ as to details of the custom and it is now becoming obsolete. Of course "moral doctrines" have been invented to bring the custom under a broad principle.1154 It appears, however, that the husbands, in the Nair system, are successive, not contemporaneous. The custom is due to the Vedic notion that every virgin contains a demon who leaves her with the nuptial blood, causing some risk to her husband. Hence a maiden was married to a man who was to disappear after a few hours, having incurred the risk.1155 Here, then, we have a case of aberrant mores due to a superstitious explanation of natural facts. Polygamy of the second form above defined is limited by cost. Although polygamy is allowed under Mohammedan law, it is not common for a Mohammedan to have more than one wife, on account of expense and trouble. Lane estimated at not more than one in twenty the number of men in Egypt, in the first half of the nineteenth century, who had more than one wife. If a woman is childless, her husband may take another wife, especially if he likes the first one too well to divorce her.1156 That is to say, polygamy and divorce are alternatives. Other authorities state that polygamy is more common and real amongst Mohammedans than would appear from Lane's statement. In the cities of Arabia more than one wife is the rule, and the Arabs in Jerusalem take three or four wives as soon as they have sufficient means. The poorest have at least two.1157

367. Consistency of the mores under polygamy or polyandry. When the life conditions, real or imagined, produce polygamy, monogamy, or polyandry, all the mores conform to the one system or the other, and develop it on every side. All the concepts of right and wrong—rights, duties, authority, societal policy, and political interest—are implicit in the mores. They must necessarily all be consistent. A Nair woman is no more likely to overstep the mores of her society than an English woman is to overstep the mores of hers. "The relations between the sexes in Malabar are unusually happy."1158 Tibetan men are said to be courteous to women.1159 Tibetan women like polyandry. They sneer at the dullness and monotony of monogamic life.1160 Thus the ethics follow the customs.

368. Mother family and father family. The ultimate reasons for the mother family and for a change to the father family are in the life conditions, industrial arts, war, pressure of population, etc. In fact, our terms are only names for a group of mores which cover some set of interests, and we need to be on our guard against the category fallacy, that is, against arguing from the contents of the classification which we have made. The term "matriarchate" encouraged this fallacy and has gone out of use. By the mother family we mean the system in which descent and kin are reckoned through women, not through men. In that form of the family the relation of man and wife is one of contract. The woman must be thought of as at her home, with her kin, and the husband comes to her. She has great control of the terms on which he is accepted, and she and her kin can drive him away again, if they see fit. The children will be hers and will remain with her. The property will remain hers, while her husband must abandon his property when he comes to her. The next male friend of a woman will be her brother, not her husband, and the next male guardian of a child will be his mother's brother, not his father. Words of relationship, address, etc., must all conform to the fundamental notion which rules the family. Religion, political control, modes of warfare and alliance, and education are all constructed to fit the family-form. At puberty boys are taken into the political organization (tribe) to which the father belongs and get political status from that. By birth each one is a member of a blood-kin group (clan) on which depend blood revenge and other duties and by which marriage is regulated. All this grows up as a part of the folkways, instinctively, without plan or guidance of intelligent control. Yet it has been wrought out, along the same logical lines of custom and rule, all over the world by savage peoples. We meet with many variations of it in transitional forms, or in combination with later institutions, but they belong to the time when this arrangement is breaking down, and passing into the father family. The mother family system is definite and complete when flourishing and normal. By the totem device the mother family is made capable of indefinite extension, and a verification is provided for its essential facts. The status of women, in the mother family, was strong and independent. Often important societal functions were entrusted to them, and their influence was so high that it produced great results, like the conferring of glory on braves, and the election of war chiefs. In cases, as for instance the ancient Lycians, the men were treated with harshness and abuse. The distribution of social power between the sexes gave opportunity for this, and the opportunity was seized.1161

369. Change from mother family to father family. It may well be believed that the change from the mother family to the father family is the greatest and most revolutionary in the history of civilization. By changes in the life conditions it becomes possible for the man to get his wife to himself away from her kin, and to become the owner of his children. In the mother family those arrangements could only be suggested to him as modifications of his experience which would be eagerly to be desired, i.e. as objects of idealization. When the life conditions so changed that it became possible, the father family displaced the mother family. All the folkways followed the change. Family arrangements, kin, industry, war, political organization, property, rights, must all conform to the change. The wife is obtained by capture, purchase, or later by contract. By capture or purchase she passes under her husband's dominion, and she may not be a consenting party. She loses status by the change. In the earlier period the man might get a wife by capture. She would be either a work-wife or a love-wife. Now a real status-wife would be obtained by real or fictitious capture and get her status from that fact; that is, she becomes very much at the mercy of her husband. The same is true of a purchased wife. The relation of a wife to her husband is analogous to property. The same is true of the relation of children to their father. The husband gives, sells, or lends wife or daughters as he sees fit, although an interference with his dominion over them without his consent would be a thing to be earnestly resented. Loyalty and fidelity to husband became the highest duties of wives, which the husband enforced by physical penalties. Female honor, for wives, consisted in chastity, which meant self-submission to the limitations which men desired in wives and which the mores had approved, for the mores teach the women what conduct on their part is "right," and teach them that it is "right" that they should be taken as wives by capture or purchase. Female virtue and honor, therefore, acquire technical definitions out of the mores, which are not parallel to any definitions of virtue and honor as applied to males. In Deut. xxi. 10 the case of a man enamored of a captive woman is considered, and rules are set for it. The woman may not be sold for money after she has been "humbled." It is evident that the notions of right and wrong, and of rights in marriage and the family, are altogether contingent and relative. In the mores of any form of the family the ideas of rights, and of right and wrong, will conform to the theory of the institution, and they may offer us notions of moral things which are radically divergent or antagonistic.

370. Capture and purchase become ceremonies. As population increases and tribes are pushed closer together, capture loses violence and is modified by a compromise, with payment of money as a composition, and by treaty, until it becomes a ceremony. Then purchase degenerates into a ceremony, partly by idealization, i.e. the purchase ceremony is necessary, but the arrangement would seem more honorable if some other construction were put on it. The father, if he takes the customary bride price but is rich and loves his daughter, so that he wants to soften for her the lot of a wife as women generally find it, gives a dowry and by that binds her husband to stipulations as to the rights and treatment which she shall enjoy. In Homer's time, no man of rank and wealth gave his daughter without a dowry, although he took gifts for her, even, if she was in great demand, to a greater value.1162 What the rich and great do sets the fashion which others follow as far as they can. In the laws of Manu we see purchase not yet obsolete, but already regarded as shameful, if it really is a sale, and so subjected to idealization; that is, they try to put another construction on it. The ceremonies of purchase and capture lasted for a very long time, because there was no other way to indicate the bond of wedlock until the promise came into use. That has never furnished a bond of equal reality to that of capture or purchase.

371. Feminine honor and virtue. Jealousy. As the old ceremonies become obsolete the property idea fades out of the marital relation, and the woman's exclusive devotion to her husband is no longer a rational inference from capture or purchase by him, but becomes a sentiment of sex. Idealization comes into play again and sets a standard of female honor and duty which rests on womanhood only, and therefore does not apply to men. It is the lot of every woman to stand beside some man, and to give her strength and life to help him in every way which circumstances offer opportunity for. Out of this relation come her ideas of her honor, duties, and virtue. Jealousy on the part of the husband also changes its sense. He thinks it an abomination to lend, sell, or give his wife. Jealousy is not now the sentiment of a property owner, but it is a masculine sex sentiment which corresponds to the woman's sex honor and duty. What she gives to him alone he accepts on the same basis of exclusiveness.