Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/373

 peoples, as among individuals, vital concurrence and selection do their work. Now, when it is a matter of institutions so essentially vital as marriage and the family, the least amelioration is of the highest importance; it has an influence on the number and quality of fresh generations, and on the flesh and spirit of peoples. All things being equal, the preponderance, whether pacific or not, will always fall to the nations which produce the greatest number of the most robust, most intelligent, and best citizens. These better endowed nations will often absorb or replace the others, and always in the long run will be docilely imitated by them. Ethnography and history show us the true sense of evolution in the past. Societies have constantly advanced from confusion to distinction. Monogamic marriage has succeeded to various more confused modes of sexual association. So also the family is the ultimate residuum of vast communities of ill-defined relationships. In its turn, the family itself has become restricted. At first it was still a sort of little clan; and then it was reduced to be essentially no more than the very modest group formed by the father, the mother, and the children. At the same time the familial patrimony crumbled, just as that of the clan had been previously parcelled out; it became individual. What is reserved for us in the future? Will the family be reconstituted by a slow movement of retrogression, as Herbert Spencer believes? Nothing is less probable.

Institutions have this in common with rivers, that they do not easily flow back towards their source. If they sometimes seem to retrograde, it is generally a mere appearance, resulting from a sort of sociologic rhythm. In truth, the end and the beginning may assume a superficial analogy, masking a profound difference. Thus the unconscious atheism of the Kaffirs has nothing in common with that of Lucretius, and nothing can be less analogous than the anarchic equality of the Fuegians and American individualism. If, as is probable, the individualist evolution, already so long begun, continues in the future, the civilised family—that is to say, the last collective unit of societies—must again be disintegrated, and finally subsist no longer except in genealogy scientifically registered with ever-increasing care; for it is,