Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/83

 importance, which is regulated according to individual caprice. More generally the parents, and sometimes the friends or the chiefs, pair the young people as they think fit, and quite naturally they have little regard for monogamic marriage, to the strictness of which, even in civilised societies, man finds it so difficult to bend.

The young people, on their part, have hardly any individual preferences. The young boys of the Redskins, as Lafitau tells us, never even troubled to see, before marriage, the wife chosen for them by their parents. In Bargo, according to R. and J. Lander, they marry with perfect indifference; "a man does not care any more about choosing a wife than about which ear of corn he shall pick." There is never any question as to the sentiments of the contracting parties.

It is quite certain, also, that during the first ages of the evolution of societies, the ties of kinship, even those we are accustomed to regard as sacred, and respect for which seems to be incarnate in us, have not been any impediment to sexual unions. Like the sentiment of modesty, the horror of incest has only been engraved on the human conscience with great difficulty and by long culture. Scruples of this kind are unknown to the animal, and before they could arise in the human brain it was first necessary that the family should be constituted, and then that, from some motive or other, the custom of exogamous marriage should be adopted. Now, as we shall see later, the family has at first been matriarchal or rather maternal, and with such a familial system, the children have no legal father; the prohibitions relative to incest could therefore, at the most, only exist in regard to the female line, and, in fact, we find it to be so in many countries where this system of filiation prevails. But primitive morals, existing before the formation of a morality condemning incest, have left many traces in the past, and even in the present. "The Chippeways," says Hearne, "frequently cohabit with their mother, and oftener still with their sisters and daughters." And yet he is speaking here of Redskins, a people reputed to be