Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/353

 Rh brogans: doubtless a relic of group-marriage. The elopement renders the bride's family furious. A hue and cry follows; and, if caught, the bridegroom has to fight the bride's male relatives, while she, on the other hand, is speared or beaten. A second or third elopement must be accomplished before the couple are forgiven. Elopement with a woman already appropriated entails, of course, much more serious consequences.

It is difficult to seize the exact meaning of the precept reported thus concisely. Addressed to the youthful Kurnai, and reinforced by another precept I shall mention presently, it may amount to a total (though perhaps temporary) prohibition of all female intercourse. This is not within the scope of the Seventh Commandment. Or it may be merely a prohibition of violence. If so, with the crude and cruel Australian fashions of courting, it is hardly going too far to assert that in a large number of cases a young man cannot appropriate any woman, even in a legitimate manner, without breach of it. Naturally, the elders desire to postpone such appropriation as long as possible, both because it infringes their monopoly, and because of the quarrels, not to say feuds, it risks. Failing either of these explanations, we must fill in the details in some such way as Mr. Palmer has done. On the whole, it is clear that the precept in question is directed to produce neither the moral quality of chastity^ nor chivalry towards women; it is firstly and chiefly an engine of government. Its ethics are not one inch in advance of the general state of savagery of the Kurnai.

The last of the five precepts is: "To obey the food-restrictions until they are released from them by the old men." Mr. Lang curtails it of the qualifying clause, and appends the words "Leviticus, passim." The forbidden food is the