Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/441

 Totemism, and Religion. 405

each man "jealously guarding his wives against all other men." (2) Man solitary, with his wives and offspring : no other adult male in his band. By neither Darwinian alter- native is "communal marriage" conceivably possible. I agree with Mr. Darwin, and Lord Avebury differs from him ; hence our systems of explaining the actual marriage regula- tions of very backward races inevitably vary in inverse ratio to the square of the distance which divides our initial hypotheses. In mine, man began with individual families ; in Lord Avebury 's, man began with sexual promiscuity and with no consciousness of consanguineous kinship.

Lord Avebury, again, is staunch to his idea of forty years ago that marriage originated in Capture. " If a man captured a woman belonging to another tribe" (my italics), " he thereby acquired an individual and peculiar right to her, and she became exclusively his property, no one else having any claim on or right over her." The women, in such a "tribe," would be (i) the native ladies, and {2) \.\\q captured brides. The captives would have the disadvantage of being, so to say, slaves, but each had the protection and affection of one man, her captor. The native women would be nominally free, but could refuse "the attentions" of no tribesman, and had no special claim on any man for food, shelter, and protection. Many of these women would like to be in the respectable and relatively secure position of the Brides of the Spear, whom I can imagine as already putting on airs of superior respectability; that they must have done. Again, many men would desire to have each a woman exclusively his own. That could be done, says our author,, by men applying the right of capture even to women belonging to their own tribe.'* The original capture of a woman from an alien tribe might be, not vi et armis, but by wooing.

By the word " tribe " Lord Avebury appears to mean a local tribe of considerable size. Such tribes are friendly


 * Avebury, pp. 39-41.