Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/24

18 their group. Other tribes again observe the custom of forcing their men to choose their women inside of their own group only. McLennan calls the first exogamous, the second endogamous, and construes forthwith a rigid contrast between exogamous and endogamous "tribes." And though his own investigation of exogamy makes it painfully obvious that this contrast in many, if not in most or even in all cases, exists in his own imagination only, he nevertheless makes it the basis of his entire theory. According to the latter, exogamous tribes can choose their women only from other tribes. And as in conformity with their savage state a condition of continual warfare existed among such tribes, women could only be secured by abduction.

McLennan further asks: Whence this custom of exogamy? The idea of consanguinity and rape could not have anything to do with it, since these conceptions were developed much later. But it was a widely spread custom among savages to kill female children immediately after their birth. This produced a surplus of males in such a tribe which naturally resulted in the condition where several men had one woman—polyandry. The next consequence was that the mother of a child could be ascertained, but not its father; hence: descent only traced by the female line and exclusion of male lineage—maternal law. And a second consequence of the scarcity of women in a certain tribe—a scarcity that was somwhatsomewhat [sic] mitigated, but not relieved by polyandry—was precisely the forcible abduction of women from other tribes. "As exogamy and polyandry are referable to one and the same cause—a want of balance between the sexes—we are forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous…. Therefore we must hold it to be beyond dispute that among exogamous races the