Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/83

Rh warriors and hunters. Then they were disciplined into the life of men and left the family. They got wives and founded families, but the father, in his own family, was an outsider and a stranger with few functions and little authority.

Mohammed gave approval to the father-family, which seems to have been winning acceptance in his time. Islam is founded on the father-family. In the Koran women are divided into three classes in respect to marriage: first, wives, that is, status-wives with all the rank, honor, and rights which the name implies; second, concubines, that is, wives of an inferior class, in a permanent and recognized relation, but without the rank and honor of wives; third, slaves, whose greatest chance of happiness was to "find favor" in the eyes of their master or owner. This classification of the wives was also a classification of the mothers, and it produced jealousy and strife of the children. Only men of rank and wealth could have households of this complex character. Those of limited means had to choose which form of wife they would take. The full status-wife could make such demands that she became a great burden to her husband, and it appears that the Moslems now prefer concubines or slaves. In Mohammedan royal families the jealousies and strifes of children, where the son of a slave might be preferred and made heir by the father, have reduced kingdoms and families to bloodshed and anarchy.

In general, in the mother-family, the domestic system must have lacked integration and discipline. The Six Nations or Iroquois had the mother-family in well-developed form. Each woman with her husband and children had a room about seven feet square in the "long house." This room was separated from others inhabited by similar families, not by a partition, but only by a pole three or four feet