Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/50

 ours and often enough in direct contradiction with them—we arrive at a form of sexual intercourse that can only be designated as unrestricted. Unrestricted in the sense that the barriers drawn later on by custom did not yet exist. This in no way necessarily implies for practical purposes an injudicious pell-mell intercourse. The separate existence of pairs for a limited time is not out of the question, and even comprises the majority of cases in the group marriage of our days. And if the latest repudiator of such a primeval state, Westermarck, designates as marriage every case, where both sexes remain mated until the birth of the offspring, then this is equivalent to saying that this kind of marriage may well exist during a stage of unrestricted intercourse without contradicting license, i. e., absence of barriers drawn by custom for sexual intercourse, Westermarck bases himself on the opinion that "license includes the suppression of individual affections" so that "prostitution is its most genuine form." To me it rather seems that any understanding of primeval conditions is impossible as long as we look at them through brothel spectacles. We shall return to this point in the group marriage.

According to Morgan, the following forms developed from this primeval state at an apparently early stage:

1. THE CONSANGUINE FAMILY.

The Consanguine Family is the first step toward the family. Here the marriage groups are arranged by generations: all the grand-fathers and grand-mothers within a certain family are mutually husbands and wives; and equally their children, the fathers and mothers, whose children form a third cycle of mutual mates. The children of these again, the great-grandchildren of the first cycle, will form a fourth. In this form of the family, then, only ancestors and descendants are excluded from what we would call the