Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/413

 the Sexual Promiscuity, or the Sexual Aversion hypothesis, may be deduced as to the origin of Matriarchy. Note, then, that the main condition of the establishment of both the Modern and the Ancient, and, so far as we know, Primary, Civilisations, has been identical : the settlem.ent of ethnologically or economically Higher among ethnologically or economically Lower Races. But there has been this difference : the Romans, Spaniards, British, etc., in settling among savage or barbarous peoples have not taken their Women with them, having had secure and permanent homes to leave them in. It was certainly not so with the earlier and earliest founders of Civilisation. But how could White Colonists settling with their Women among — in the words of Berosos recording the ancient Chaldean tradition — "a great multitude of men living lawlessly and after the manner of beasts"^ — how could such Colonists obtain for their women respect, and for their race supremacy, save by surrending a certain proportion of their Women to the Coloured and Black Races, but — and in the most natural way — on just such conditions of Superiority accorded, and willingly accorded^ to the Women as I have above particularised as characteristic of Matriarchy ? If, however, the White Women married to men of the Lower Races (i) held property and power by their own right ; if (2) descent were traced, and property and power inherited from these White Women ; if (3) the hus- band of Lower Race lived in the Vhite Woman's house, or her father's, and her brother had more authority over her children than her husband ; if (4) the White Women had the right each to several husbands, and to divorce ; and if (5) the AVhite Vomen exercised power and leadership over the Lower Races to whom they were thus united, is it not evident that the whole organi- sation — or perhaps one should say rather, aggregation— of the surrounding Lower Races would be gradually, and, no doubt, at first, insensibly changed, but in such a way as to insure to the White Colonists what we know that they somehow obtained, com-

1 Lenormant, Fragments cosmog. de Berose, p. 6.

2 I say "willingly accorded", because, so far as we have evidence in modern times of the settlement of " unprotected" white women among savage-races. Superiority had been accorded to them without any demand on the part of white kinsmen. See, for instance, the case of the shipwreck on the south-east coast of Africa, about 1770, mentioned in Buckland, Anthropological Studies, p. 77-