Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/296

282 cannot suppose coyness to be wholly absent. Hence that amount of it which really exists, joined with that further amount simulated for reputation's sake, will make resistance, and consequently capture, natural phenomena. Moreover, since a savage makes his wife a slave, and usually treats her brutally, she has an additional motive for resistance.

Nor does forcible opposition proceed only from the girl and her female friends: the male members of her family also are likely to be opponents. A woman is of value not only as a wife, but also as a daughter; and all through, from the lowest to the highest stages of social progress, we find a tacit or avowed claim to her services by her father. It is so even with the degraded Fuegians: an equivalent in the shape of service rendered has to be given for her by the youth, "such as helping to make a canoe." It is so with numerous more advanced savages all over the world: there is either the like giving of stipulated work, or the giving of a price. And we have evidence that it was originally so among ourselves: in an action for seduction the deprivation of a daughter's services is the injury alleged. Hence it is inferable that in the rudest states, where claims, parental or other, are but little regarded, the taking away of a daughter is likely to become the occasion of a fight. Facts support this conclusion. Of the Araucanians Smith tells us that, when there is opposition of the parents, "the neighbors are immediately summoned by blowing the horn, and chase is given." "Among the Gándors, a tribe on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, the bridegroom must run away with his bride, although he thereby exposes himself to the vengeance of her parents, who, if they find him within three days, can lawfully put him to death." And we read concerning the Gonds that "a suitor usually carries off the girl that is refused to him by the parents." Thus we find a further natural cause for the practice of capture—a cause which must have been common before social usages were well established. Indeed, on reading that among the Mapuchés the man sometimes "lays violent hands upon the damsel, and carries her off," and that "in all such cases the, visual equivalent is afterward paid to the girl's father," we may suspect that abduction, spite of parents, was the primary form; that there came next the making of compensation to escape vengeance; that this grew into the making of presents beforehand; and that so resulted eventually the system of purchase.

If, then, within a tribe there are three sources of opposition to the appropriation of a woman by a man, it does not seem that the form of capture is inexplicable unless we assume the abduction of women from other tribes.

But even supposing it to have originated in the capture of foreign women, its survival as a form of marriage would not prove exogamy to have been the law. In a tribe whose warriors had many of them wives taken from enemies, and who, as having captured their wives,