Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/110

 or relative. Certain tribes had also instituted a sort of regulated promiscuity—a collective marriage between all the men of one clan and all the women of another. I shall have to return to the consideration of this singular form of sexual association. For the moment I confine myself to noticing that rape is not always obligatory in Australia.

Neither is it so among the negroes of Africa; it is even more rare there than in Melanesia, but there also it does not constitute a marriage. Women are carried off just in the same way as other things are carried off. Thus the Damara Hottentots often steal wives from the Namaquois Hottentots. Among the Mandingos and the Timanis there is no marriage by capture, properly speaking; already they purchase the daughter from her parents, without, of course, consulting her; then the intending purchaser, aided by his friends, carries off his acquisition in a brutal manner, whether she will or not. It is a simple commercial affair; the daughter is an exchange value representing a certain number of jars of palm wine, of stuffs, etc.

Amongst the natives of America brutal rape was, or still is, very common. In Terra del Fuego, the young Fuegians carry off a woman as soon as they are able to construct or procure a canoe. From tribe to tribe the Patagonians at war exterminate the men and carry off the women. The Oen Patagonians make incursions every year at the time of "the red leaf" on the Fuegians to seize their women, their dogs, and their weapons. The Indians on the banks of the Amazon and Orinoco continually capture women, and thus every tribe is sometimes nearly without women and sometimes overflowing with them. The Caribs so frequently procured wives in this way that their women did not often speak the language of the men. In the Redskin tribe of the Mandans the rape of young women was a perpetual cause of trouble, of disorder, and of