Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/26

12 nature of the primitive human family and the order of its evolution. It seems, however, that with the lowest races monogamy is the rule. But this is the rule with the highest apes, and it cannot, therefore, be based on a strictly human element. Such monogamy is the outcome of mere instinctive natural selection. It is not a permanent union, but a temporary alliance holding through the infancy of the offspring. The monogamic pair lives an isolated life. With the increase of population and the increasing struggle for existence, larger groups are formed, and natural selection preserves the endogamous clan or tribe with its rigid rules of marriage. In such a state the women and children belong to no particular man. The principle of self-consciousness had not yet entered the institution of the family. But when we come to wife-capture, wife-purchase, and polygamy, we have individual appropriation of women. This is the true beginning of the human family as distinguished from the animal pairing or the endogamous hordes, for it is based on self-consciousness. Westermark mentions several reasons why a man may desire to possess more than one wife, such as freedom from periodical continence, attraction for female youth and beauty, taste for variety, desire for offspring, wealth, and authority. The wife whom he has captured is his own, her children are his, and with them he is freed from the kinship bond of the clan, and stands out in his own right as an individual.

McLennan's theory of the rise of exogamy brings out more clearly the economic basis of the self-conscious family. He finds the introduction of exogamy to coincide with the increasing practice of female infanticide, resulting, as it does, in a scarcity of women. The term "exogamy" with him is apparently equivalent to wife-capture, and this should be borne in mind by his critics, who find exogamy along with the matriarchate. Wife-capture and wife-purchase doubtless crept in gradually, like the private appropriation of weapons and animals, unnoticed by the clan; but because it increased the power of the stronger and led to slavery and chieftainship, it forced recognition and supplanted