Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/60

54 women. A close view of this group marriage does not offer quite such a horrible spectacle as the philistine imagination accustomed to brothel conditions generally pictures to itself. On the contrary, long years passed, before its existence was even suspected, and quite recently it is once more denied. To the casual observer it makes the impression of a loose monogamy and in certain places of polygamy, with occasional breach of faith. Years are required before one can discover, like Fison and Howitt, the law regulating these marital conditions that rather appeal in their practicability to the average European; the law e nabling the strange Papuan, thousands of miles from his home and among people whose language he does not understand, to find frequently, from camp to camp and from tribe to tribe, women who will without resistance and guilelessly surrender to him; the law according to which a man with several women offers one to his guest for the night. Where the European sees immorality and lawlessness, there in reality a strict law is observed. The women belong to the marriage class of the stranger and, therefore, they are his wives by birth. The same moral law assigning both to one another forbids under penalty of proscription all sexual intercourse outside of the two marriage classes. Even when women are abducted, as is frequently the case in certain regions, the class law is carefully respected.

In the abduction of women, by the way, a trace of transition to monogamy is found even here, at least in the form of the pairing family. If a young man has abducted a girl with the help of his friends, they hold sexual intercourse with her one after another. But after that the girl is regarded as the wife of the young man who planned the abduction. And again, if an abducted woman deserts her husband and is caught by another man, she becomes the wife of the