Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/112

 off by the Picts from the Gaels, who, finding themselves thus deprived of their women by a single blow, allied themselves then with the Irish.

I will confine myself to these examples, gleaned from all parts, and which it would be easy to multiply. They amply suffice to establish that in primitive societies woman, being held in very low esteem, is absolutely reduced to the level of chattels and of domestic animals; that she represents a booty like any other; that her master can use and abuse her without fear. But in these bestial practices there is nothing which approaches, even distantly, to marriage, and we are not in the least warranted to call these brutal rapes marriages. Even in the countries where a true marriage exists, the customs and the laws tolerate for a long time the introduction into the house of the husband captured slaves, who are treated by the master as concubines by the side of the legitimate wife or wives. The heroes of Homer profit largely by this legal tolerance, and when the Clytemnestra of Æschylus justifies herself for having killed her husband, she alleges, among other extenuating circumstances, the intimacy of Agamemnon with his slave Cassandra.

Assuredly in all this there is no marriage. We shall presently see that in many countries the concubinate, legal and patent, has co-existed, or co-exists, by the side of marriage without being confounded with it. It is important to reserve the name of marriage by capture to legal and pacific marriage, in the ceremonial of which we find practices recalling or simulating by survival the primitive rape of woman. II. Marriage by Capture.

It is to be observed that this symbolic rape does not always signify that the capture of the woman has preceded pacific conjugal union. It represents especially a mental survival, the tradition of an epoch, more or less distant, when violence was held in high esteem, and when it was glorious to procure slaves for all sorts of labour by force of arms. In the countries where the ceremonial of capture exists, the fine times of rape are generally somewhat gone