Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/296

286 who keep such a record at all have had to elect which of the two lines, male or female, they will keep up by the family name or sign, while the other line, having no such easy means of record, is more or less neglected, and soon falls out of sight. Under these circumstances, it would be quite natural that the sign should come to he considered rather than the reality, the name rather than the relationship it records, and that a series of one-sided restrictions should come into force, now bearing upon the male side rather than the female, and now upon the female side rather than the male, roughly matching the one-sided way in which the record of kindred is kept up. In any full discussion, other points have to be considered, such as the wish to bind different tribes together in friendship by intermarriage, and the opinion that a wife is a slave to be stolen from the stranger, not taken from a man's own people.

There is a good deal in this last consideration, as we may see by the practice of the Spartan marriage, in which, though the bride's guardians had really sanctioned the union, the pretence of carrying her off by force was kept up as a time-honoured ceremony. The Spartan marriage is no isolated custom, it is to be found among the Circassians, and in South America. Williams says that on the large islands of the Fiji group, the custom is often found of seizing upon a woman by apparent or actual force, in order to make her a wife. If she does not approve the proceeding, she runs off when she reaches the man's house, but if she is satisfied she stays. In these cases the abduction is a mere pretence, but it is kept up seemingly as a relic of a ruder time when, as among the modern Australians, it was done by no means as a matter of form, but in grim earnest. A few more cases will illustrate the stages through which this remarkable custom has passed, from the actual violent carrying off of unwilling women, down to the formal pretence of abduction kept up as a marriage ceremony. Among the Kols of North-East India, in public market, a young man with a party of friends will carry off a girl, struggling and screaming, but no one not interested interferes, and the girl's