Amid the wonderful uniformity which pervades the thoughts and customs of the world some strange reversals here and there occur, as where white is the colour significative of grief, or where to turn one’s back on a person is a sign of reverence. But perhaps few such reversals are more curious than the custom of the Garos, in India, who consider any infringement of the rule that all proposals of marriage must come from the female side as an insult to the mahÁri to which the lady belongs, only to be atoned for by liberal donations of beer and pigs from the man’s mahÁri to that of the ‘proposee.’ More curious, however, than even this is their marriage ceremony; at which, after the bride has been bathed in the nearest stream, the wedding party proceed to the house of the bridegroom, ‘who pretends to be unwilling and runs away, but is caught and subjected to a similar ablution, and then taken, in spite of the resistance and counterfeited grief and lamentations of his parents, to the bride’s house.’[249]
An exactly analogous custom as regards the bride’s behaviour at her wedding is sufficiently well known; and if it has been correctly interpreted as the survival, in form and symbol, of a system of capturing wives from a neighbouring tribe, there must have been a time when among the Garos a husband could only have been obtained in a similar way. The improbability of this suggests the possibility of some other explanation underlying the reluctance, feigned or real, with which it is common in savage life for a girl to enter upon the paths of matrimony, and for the show of resistance with which her friends oppose her departure with her husband.
In many instances this peculiar feature of primitive life appears as simply the outcome of feelings and affections which are the same, howsoever different in expression, in savage as in civilised lands. The conviction that there is an utter absence of anything like love between children and their parents, or between men and women, in the ruder social communities, is so strong and has been so often dwelt upon, that in speculations on this subject there is a tendency and danger of altogether overlooking the influence of natural affection in the formation of customs. It is needful, therefore, to preface the present chapter with a brief reference to the express statements of missionaries and travellers; for if it can be shown that there is such a thing as affection between parents and children, the inference is fair that neither would parents part with their children nor children leave their parents without mutual regret, when the children are married.
Of the Fijians, so famous for their cannibalism and their parenticide, it is declared to be ‘truly touching to see how parents are attached to their children and children to their parents.’[250] Among the Tongans, who would sacrifice their children cruelly for the recovery of the sick, children were ‘taken the utmost care of.’[251] The New Zealanders were not guiltless of infanticide, yet ‘some of them, and especially the fathers, seemed fond of their children.’[252] The Papuans of New Guinea manifested ‘respect for the aged, love for their children, and fidelity to their wives.’[253] In Africa, Mungo Park says of the Mandingoes: ‘The maternal affection is everywhere conspicuous among them, and creates a corresponding return of tenderness in the child.’[254] Among the Eastern Ethiopians were women who lived a wild life in the woods; yet the testimony is the same: ‘However barbarous these people be by nature, they yet are not devoid of feeling for their children; these they rear with nicest care, and for their provision strive to amass what property they can.’[255] Yoruba ‘children are much beloved by both parents.’[256] Love for their children unites the greater number of the Bushmen for their whole lives.[257] In North America the Thlinkeet Indians ‘treat their wives and children with much affection and kindness.’[258] Among the Greenlanders, says Cranz, ‘the bonds of filial and parental love seem stronger than amongst any other nations.’ Their fondness for their children is great; parents seldom let them out of their sight, and mothers often throw themselves in the water to save a child from drowning. In return ingratitude towards their aged parents is ‘scarcely ever exemplified among them.’[259] Of the natives of Australia, Sir G. Grey says that they ‘are always ardently attached to their children,’ and similar testimony has been borne to the parental affection even of the Tasmanians.[260]
But, lest it should be thought that these evidences are drawn from the higher savagery, let appeal be made to the case of savages who confessedly belong to the lowest known types of mankind, the Andaman Islanders, the Veddahs, and the Fuejians.
In reference to the first it is said that ‘the parents are fond of their children, and the affection is reciprocal.’[261] The Veddahs are not only ‘kind and constant to their wives,’ but ‘fond of their children;’[262] whilst Mr. Parker Snow saw among the Fuejians ‘many instances of warm love and affection for their children;’[263] so that if in the sequel we find daughters at their marriage displaying a real or simulated repugnance to their fate, the fact need not appear to us of such extreme mystery as it otherwise might, nor as one in which natural affection can play no part.
A recent Italian writer on the primitive domestic state says that ‘la passione viva d’amore che suole attribuirsi ai popoli primitivi ... É una pura illusione.’[264] But happily for the primitive populations, their lot is far from being really thus unbrightened by love, though with them, as with the rest of the world, it is a frequent cause of wars and quarrels, interfering especially with the savage custom of infant betrothal, and leading to elopements in defeat of parental contracts. It is peculiar to neither sex. A Tahitian girl, love-stricken, but not encouraged, led her friends, by her threats of suicide, to persuade the object of her affections to make her his wife.[265] The Tongans had a pretty legend of a young chief, who, having fallen in love with a maiden already betrothed to a superior, saved her, when she was condemned to be killed with the other relations of a rebel, by hiding her in a cavern he had found, whence they finally effected their joint escape to Fiji.[266] New Zealand mythology abounds in love-tales. There is the tale of Hinemoa and Tutanekai, which begins with stolen glances, and ends in a nocturnal swim on the part of Hinemoa to the island, whither the music of her lover guided her. There is the tale also of Takaranji and Raumahora—of Takaranji, who, though besieging her father in his fortress, consented to present both of them with water in their distress. ‘And Takaranji gazed eagerly at the young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takaranji ... and as the warriors of the army of Takaranji looked on, lo, he had climbed up and was sitting at the young maiden’s side; and they said among themselves, “O comrades, our lord Takaranji loves war, but one would think he likes Raumahora almost as well.’”[267]
Nor would it be fair to argue, because in most savage tribes the hard work of life devolves upon the women, that therefore there is an entire absence of affection in savage households, whether polygamous or otherwise, during their continuance. It is scarcely a hundred years ago that in Caithness ‘the hard work was chiefly done, and the burdens borne, by the women; and if a cottier lost a horse, it was not unusual for him to marry a wife as the cheapest substitute.’[268] The Fuejians, whose condition Captain Weddell felt compelled to describe as that of the lowest of mankind, and whose women did all the work, gathering the shellfish, managing the canoes, and building the wigwams, are said to have shown ‘a good deal of affection for their wives,’ and care for their offspring.[269] Among the Fijians, who made their women carry all the heavy loads and do all the field-work, and who remonstrated with the Tongans for their more humane treatment of them, not only have widows been known to kill themselves if their relatives refused to do the duty which custom laid upon them—namely, of killing them at their husbands’ burial—but ‘even widowers, in the depth of their grief, have frequently terminated their existence when deprived of a dearly beloved wife.’[270] In India, Abor husbands treated their wives with a consideration that appeared ‘singular in so rude a race.’[271] In America the lot of a woman was generally one of hardship; yet, says Schoolcraft, ‘the gentler affections have a much more extensive and powerful exercise among the Indians than is generally believed.’[272] Carib husbands are said to have had much love for their wives, like as it was to a straw fire, except with respect to the first wife they married.[273] Of the Thlinkeet Indians, characterised by great cruelty to prisoners and other marks of much barbarity, it is said that ‘there are few savage nations in which the women have greater influence or command greater respect.’[274] ‘It is one of the fine traits,’ says Schweinfurth of the cannibal Niam-Niam, ‘that they display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled among natives of so low a grade ... a husband will spare no sacrifice to redeem an imprisoned wife.’[275] Though against this evidence there is much of a darker character to be set, the above instances will suffice to demonstrate the real existence, the real operation, among some of the rudest representatives of our species, of ordinary feelings of love and affection. As in geology so in ethnology it holds true, that the action of known existing causes is sufficient to account for much that is obscure in the past and for all that is strange in the present.
Having so far cleared the ground as to be justified in postulating the existence of ordinary feelings of affection between parents and children, and between men and women, as verÆ causÆ, or real forces, even in the lowest known savage life, let us pass to the inference that at no time are those feelings more likely to be called into play than at a time when the daughter of a family is about to leave her parents, and perhaps her clan, to live henceforth with a man whom she may not even know, or knows only to dislike.[276] In China, where on the wedding-day the bride is locked up in a sedan-chair, and the key and chair consigned to the bridegroom, who may not see her before that day, a traveller once witnessed a separation between the bride and her family. ‘All the family appeared much affected, particularly the women, who sobbed aloud; the father shed tears, and the daughter was with difficulty torn from the embraces of her parents and placed in the sedan-chair.’[277] It seems more likely in this case that the reluctance and resistance were real, than that they were merely the symbols, conventionally observed, of a system of wife-capture. But in many instances it is impossible to distinguish a real from a feigned grief. A witness of the marriage ceremonies among the Tartars, who describes the bride and her girl friends as raising piteous lamentations beforehand, says that the poor girl either was or appeared to be a most unwilling victim.[278]
Jenkinson, one of the earliest English travellers in Russia, noticed the same custom there, but thought it affectation. On the day of marriage the bride would in nowise consent to leave the house to go to church, but would resist, strive, and weep, only suffering herself to be led there by force, with her face covered, to hide her simulated grief, and making a great noise, as though she were sobbing and weeping, all the way to the scene of her wedding.[279] But a modern French writer ascribes some reality to the custom, mentioning that traditional songs are still sung in which the young bride addresses words of regret and sorrow to her parents in the midst of her preparations for the nuptial feast.[280] Before this last ceremony she is accustomed to go the round of her village, with a woman who calls for the sympathy of her hearers for the young girl whose carefree existence is about to be exchanged for the troubles and anxieties of married life.[281]
Yet, if in China and Russia, much more among uncivilized tribes, would the life in prospect for a bride, unless perchance her wishes coincided with her parents’ interest, cause her to leave the home of her youth with something more than those ‘light regrets’ which cause tears to commingle with smiles even in England. Greenland girls, says Cranz, do nothing till they are fourteen but sing, dance, and romp about; but a life of slavery is in store for them as soon as they are fit for it; ‘while they remain with their parents they are well off, but from twenty years of age till death their life is one series of anxieties, wretchedness, and toil.’[282] Marriage is a fate they would not seek, but cannot avoid. Should they, however, not oppose it, they must enter upon it with reluctance, not with alacrity.
It is worth noticing the reason Cranz gives for this reluctance, because, in so far as modern savages may be taken to represent primitive life, it proves the existence, in that condition, of notions, howsoever they may have arisen, which are exactly analogous to those we connote by the word ‘modesty.’ When the two old women, commissioned to negotiate with a girl’s parents on behalf of a young man, first give a hint of their purpose by praise of him and of his family, ‘the damsel directly falls into the greatest apparent consternation and runs out of doors, tearing her bunch of hair; for single women always affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty, though their destined husbands be previously well assured of their acquiescence.’[283] Not, indeed, that the reluctance is always feigned, for sometimes the name of her proposed husband causes her to swoon, to elope to a desert place, or to effectually free herself from further addresses, by cutting off her hair in token of grief. Should, however, her parents consent to the match, the usual course is for the old women to go in search of her, ‘and drag her forcibly into the suitor’s house, where she sits for several days quite disconsolate, with dishevelled hair, and refuses nourishment. When friendly exhortations are unavailing she is compelled by force, and even blows, to receive her husband.’
In Greenland, then, as in China, the form of capture resolves itself either into a most unequivocal reluctance to leave home or to a reluctance so to do feigned from feelings of bashfulness. Nor about this bashfulness does it appear that Cranz was in error, for Egede agrees substantially with him, telling how the bridegroom, when he has obtained her parents’ and relations’ consent, sends some old women to carry away the bride by force; ‘for though she ever so much approves of the match, yet out of modesty she must make as if it went against the grain, and as if she were much ruffled at it; else she will be blamed and get an ill name.’ When brought to his hut, therefore, she sits in a corner with dishevelled hair, ‘covering her face, being bashful and ashamed.’ For ‘a new-married woman is ashamed of having changed her condition for a married state;’[284] and this feeling occurs again plainly in South-Eastern Russia, where, on the eve of marriage, the bride goes round the village, throwing herself on her knees before the head of each house and begging his pardon.[285]
This last statement of Egede is most important, since it proves the existence of feelings which seem really to contain the keynote of the symbol of capture, however slight the reasons for suspecting their presence in particular cases. The sentiment prevalent in Greenland has also been noticed among the Tartars, for an authentic witness writes, ‘that if one tells a Tartar girl that it is said she is about to be married, she runs immediately out of the room and will never speak to a stranger on that subject.’[286] It has been justly observed that it is unlikely feminine delicacy should diminish with civilization. But the principle impuris omnia impura will meet the difficulty. The Aleutian Islander, says a Russian writer, ‘knows nothing of what civilized nations call modesty. He has his own ideas of what is modest and proper, while we should consider them foolish.’[287] For, addicted though he is to the worst vices of the Northern nations, he will yet blush to address his wife or ask her for anything in the presence of strangers, and will be bashful if he be caught doing anything unusual, as, for instance, buying or selling directly for himself without the agency of an intermediary.
Characteristic as it is of savages to express all the feelings they share with us with an energy intensified a hundredfold, as is shown abundantly in our different manner of grieving for the dead, it is not surprising if we find their feelings of the kind in question display themselves in extraordinary and often ludicrous rules of social intercourse. The same rule, that an Aleutian husband and wife might not be seen speaking together, led Kolbe to think that no such thing as affection existed among the Hottentots. But this was simply for the same reason that prohibited the Hottentot wife from ever setting foot in her husband’s apartment in the hut, or the latter from ever entering hers except by stealth.[288] Among the Yorubas a woman betrothed by her parents is so far a wife that prematrimonial unfaithfulness is accounted adultery; ‘yet conventional modesty forbids her to speak to her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.’[289] A minority of the Afghan tribes are careful to keep up a similar reserve between the time of betrothal and marriage, so that, as among the warlike Eusofyzes, no man can see his wife till the completion of the marriage ceremony.[290] Among the Mongols not only may bride and bridegroom not see each other within the same period, but the bride is not allowed to see his parents.[291] In Russia it was once a disgrace for a young man to propose directly to a lady, and between the day of settling the dowry with her parents and the day of marriage he was strictly forbidden the house of his betrothed.[292] But many tribes continue such reserve even after marriage. A Circassian bridegroom must not see his wife or live with her without the greatest mystery: ‘this reserve continues during life. A Circassian will sometimes permit a stranger to see his wife, but he must not accompany him.’[293] In parts of Fiji which are still unmodified by Christian teaching it is ‘quite contrary to ideas of delicacy that a man ever remains under the same roof with his wife or wives at night.’ If they wish to meet, they must appoint a secret rendezvous.[294] And a similar law of social decorum prevails, or prevailed, among the Spartans, Lycians, Turcomans, and some tribes of America,[295] though the processes of thought which led to such customs lie lost, perhaps hopelessly, behind the darkness of a thousand ages.
The custom, again, of deserting a husband and returning home for a longer or shorter period, as found among the Votyaks of Russia and the Mezeyne Arabs, may possibly be traced to feelings of the same description, for we read that among the Hos, ‘after remaining with her husband for three days only, it is the correct thing for the wife to run away from him and tell all her friends that she loves him not, and will see him no more;’ it is also correct for the husband to manifest great anxiety for his loss, and diligently to seek his wife, and ‘when he finds her he carries her off by main force.’[296] This second show of resistance, customary also among the Votyaks, seems difficult to explain as a traditional symbol of a system of capture.
It is possible that in similar primitive ideas originated the curious restrictions on the intercourse between a man and his mother-in-law, or between a woman and her father-in-law. On the theory that these are remnants of the real anger shown by parents when capture was real, it is not easy to account for the fact that in Fiji the restriction as to eating or speaking together existed not only between parents and children-in-law, or brothers and sisters-in-law, but between brothers and sisters of the same family, and also between first cousins.[297] In Suffolk ‘it is (or was) very remarkable that neither father nor mother of bride or bridegroom come with them to church’ at the weddings of agricultural labourers; and it is said that at Russian weddings also the parents are forbidden to be present, though the priest sometimes waives the prohibition in favour of persons of the higher classes.[298]
There is, therefore, no À priori inconceivability against the theory that kicking and screaming at weddings, where they do not arise from genuine reluctance, are really a tribute to conventional propriety; that, at the marriages of the uncivilized, just as at their burials, shrieks and violence take the place of tears, and a vigorous struggle argues a modest deportment. The evidence of quite independent eye-witnesses confirms this interpretation. The Thlinkeet Indian, on his wedding-day, goes to the bride’s house and sits with his back to her door. All her relations then ‘raise a song, to allure the coy bride out of the corner where she has been sitting;’ after which she goes to sit by her husband’s side; but ‘all this time she must keep her head bowed down,’ nor is she allowed to take part in the festivities of the day.[299]
Atkinson, who was witness of the first visit of a Kirghiz bridegroom to his wife, declares that the latter could only be persuaded by the pressure of her female relations to see him at all; ‘after a display of much coyness she consented, and was led by her friends to his dwelling.’[300]
In Kamschatka the original etiquette was for women to cover their faces with some kind of veil when they went out, and if they met any man on the road whom they could not avoid, to stand with their backs to him until he had passed. They would also, if a stranger entered their huts, turn their face to the wall or else hide behind a curtain of nettles.[301] Kamschatka, however, being the last place where one would have looked for such prudery, it is possible that the feelings of the Greenlanders were also operative in the marriage customs of the Kamschadals. These were rather extraordinary, the form of capture being anything but a mere symbol for an aspirant to matrimony. Such an one, having looked for a bride in some neighbouring village (seldom in his own), would offer his services to the parent for a fixed term, and after some time would ask for leave to seize the daughter for his bride. This obtained, he would seek to find her alone or ill-attended, the marriage being complete on his tearing from her some of the coats, fish-nets, and straps with which from the day of proposal she was constantly enveloped. This was never an easy matter, for she was never left alone a single instant, her mother and a number of old women accompanying her everywhere, sleeping with her, and never losing her out of sight upon any pretext whatever. Any attempt to execute his task entailed upon the suitor such kicking, hair-pulling, and face-scratching, at the hands of this female body-guard, that sometimes a year or more would elapse before he was entitled to call himself a husband; nay, there is record of one pertinacious bachelor who found himself at the end of seven years, in consequence of such treatment, not a husband, but a cripple. If he were disheartened by repeated failures he incurred great disgrace and lost all claim to the alliance; and if the bride continued obdurate from real dislike, he was ultimately expelled from the village.[302] But, however well-disposed towards him she might be, she had always to simulate refusal as a point of honour, and proof was always required ‘that she was taken by surprise and made fruitless efforts to defend herself.’[303]
The Bushmen, again, generally betroth their daughters as children without consulting them; but should a girl grow up unbetrothed her consent to be married is as necessary as that of her parents to her lover’s suit, ‘and on this occasion his attentions are received with an affectation of great alarm and disinclination on her part.’[304]
If, then, Greenlanders, Kamschadals, Thlinkeet Indians, and even Bushmen, carry their notions of propriety to the extent asserted by eye-witnesses, it is scarcely surprising to find very similar rules of etiquette among the more advanced Zulus of Africa or Bedouins of Arabia in their wedding ceremonials; especially when we are told that in some parts Bedouin women sit down and turn their backs to any man they cannot avoid on the road, and refuse to take anything from the hands of a stranger.[305] ‘The principal idea of a Kaffir wedding seems to be to show the great unwillingness of the girl to be transformed into a wife,’ for which reason a Zulu wife simulates several attempts to escape.[306] Both the Arabs of Sinai and the Aenezes enact the form of capture to the greatest perfection; among the latter ‘the bashful girl’ runs from the tent of one friend to another till she is caught at last, whilst among the former she acquires permanent repute in proportion to her struggles of resistance. And if a Sinai Arab marries a bride belonging to a distant tribe, she is placed on a camel and led to her husband’s camp escorted by women: during which procession ‘decency obliges her to cry and sob most bitterly.’[307] Also, among the modern Egyptians, ‘if the bridegroom is young, one of his friends has to carry him part of the way to the hareem, to show his bashfulness.’[308] So that where the carrying of the bride or bridegroom is not merely due to the same feelings that caused our own ancestors to add solemnity to their weddings by such singular sights as blue postilions, it appears in many cases to be nothing more than a prudish way of saying, that matrimony is and ought to be an estate forced upon reluctant victims, not entered upon by voluntary agents. The early Christian Church said the same; but where the saint and the savage meet in sentiment they differ in expression.
Were it not for some of the concomitant and incidental signs, the bowed or veiled head, the dishevelled hair, it might be said that the positive statements of Cranz, Egede, Burchell, and other writers arose from malobservation or from pure mistake. This objection, therefore, is of little avail; and however difficult it may be to account for the presence of such sentiments among tribes of so rude a type as the Esquimaux, the Kamschadals, and the Bushmen, the fact remains, that in the cases above cited the ‘form of capture’ is explicable as having its origin in primitive conceptions of what is due to delicacy; as being, in fact, the original expression of them in the language of pantomime so common to savages.[309] And the presence of such feelings of delicacy may be often suspected, even where they are not directly mentioned, in the ceremony of capture; as, for instance, in the African kingdom of Futa, where the form of capture prevails in the usual way, but where we have the indirect evidence that for months after marriage the bride never stirs abroad without a veil, and that Futa wives are ‘so bashful that they never permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their marriage.’[310]
There is, however, no reason to press this explanation too far, nor to account it the only efficient cause. Quite as potent, and perhaps a more natural one, is dislike and disinclination on the part of the bride, which compels the bridegroom to resort to force. The conditions of savage life are a sufficient explanation of this, irrespective of any old custom of capturing wives out of a tribe by reason of a prejudice against marrying within it. A man proposes personally or mediately to the parents or relations of the woman he fancies for a wife; if they consent to accept him as a son-in-law and they agree as to a price, there is a reserved stipulation on the part of the vendor: ‘If you can get her.’ In Tartary, in the thirteenth century, after such a bargain, the daughter would flee to one of her kinsfolk to hide; the father would say to the husband, ‘My daughter is yours; take her wheresoever you can find her.’ The suitor, seeking with his friends till he found her, would then take her by force and carry her home.[311] Here the girl’s reluctance is not so much feigned as overridden, and is only so far formal in that it is entirely disregarded. Often it is no mere ceremony on her part, but a natural and genuine protest—a protest against being treated as a chattel, not as an individual—but a protest which, opposed as it is to parental persuasion and marital force, tends, as far as the husband is concerned, to pass into the region of the merest ceremony.
A few instances will suffice to illustrate the co-operation of dislike and force in savage matrimony. In some Californian tribes the consent of the girl is necessary, although ‘if she violently opposes the match she is seldom compelled to marry or to be sold.’ Among the Neshenam tribe of the same people ‘the girl has no voice whatever in the matter, and resistance on her part merely occasions brute force to be used by her purchaser.’[312] So in the Utah country, where ‘families and tribes living at peace would steal each others’ wives and children and sell them as slaves,’ a wife is usually bought of her parents; but should she refuse, ‘the warrior collects his friends, carries off the recusant fair,’ and thus espouses her.[313] So among the Navajoes ‘the consent of the father is absolute, and the one so purchased assents or is taken away by force.’[314] It is the same with the Horse Indians of Patagonia. There, as elsewhere, it is common for a cacique to have several wives, and poor men only one, marriages being ‘made by sale more frequently than by mutual agreement.’ The price is often high, and girls are betrothed without their knowledge in infancy and married without their consent at maturity. But ‘if a girl dislikes a match made for her she resists; and although dragged forcibly to the tent of her lawful owner, plagues him so much by her contumacy that he at last turns her away, and sells her to the person on whom she has fixed her affections.’[315] In Africa, Yorubas, Mandingoes, and Koossa Kafirs follow the custom of infant betrothal (and it is worth notice as being quite in accordance with the theory that kinship was originally traced through mothers, that Yoruba, Mandingo, and Loango Africans, and some Esquimaux tribes, regard the mother’s consent only as necessary to an engagement);[316] but sometimes a Yoruba girl, when the time comes for her to fulfil her mother’s engagement, preferring some other than the intended husband, absolutely refuses to co-operate. ‘Then she is either teased and worried into submission or the husband agrees to receive back her dowry and release her.’[317] A Mandingo girl must either marry a suitor chosen for her or remain ever afterwards unmarried. Should she refuse, the lover is authorized by the parents ‘by the laws of the country to seize on the girl as his slave.’[318] If a Koossa girl, bound by the contract of her parents, ‘makes any attempt at resisting the union, corporal punishment is even resorted to, in order to compel her submission.’[319]
It appears, therefore, that resistance on the part of the bride in many cases procures her ultimate release, so that her wishes in the matter are always an element to be considered. In all contracts of marriage, to which she is seldom a party, there is accordingly, in the nature of things, an implied covenant that a daughter shall be so far allowed a voice in the matter that if she can make good her resistance she shall not become the property of the intending purchaser. The frequency with which it must have occurred that a girl would defeat a match she disliked by flight, elopement, or resistance, would tend to create a sort of common law right, for all daughters sold in marriage to a certain ‘run’ for their independence;[320] and the amusement naturally connected with the exercise of such a right would help to preserve the custom in a modified form; so that, however slight in some cases might be the modesty of the bride or her dislike of her suitor, her friends, if only for the sport of the thing, would gladly enact the fiction of an outrage to be resented, of a woman to be defended. In all the interesting cases of the form of capture cited by Sir John Lubbock it appears that in eight (that is, among the Mantras, the Kalmucks, the Fuejians, the Fijians, the New Zealanders, the Papuans of New Guinea, the Philippine Islanders, and the African Kafirs and Futas), the ceremony affords the bride a chance of an effectual escape from a match she dislikes. Should she fly, should she hide successfully, or should her friends defend her successfully, the contract between her parents and suitor becomes null and void; or sometimes, as among the Zulus and Bassutos, the price for her is raised.[321] And it is remarkable with what precision the rules of the chase have been elaborated in many instances; as by the Oleepas of Central California, among whom, if a bride is found twice out of three times, she is legally the seeker’s; and the bridegroom, if he fails the first time, is allowed a second and final attempt a few weeks later. ‘The simple result is, that if the girl likes him she hides where she is easily found; but if she disapproves of the match a dozen Indians cannot find her.’[322]
Other feelings would also be present to sustain the pretence of wife-capture. For the savage parent, in parting with his daughter for a favourable settlement, does not act from gratuitous cruelty; he provides for her future as best he can, sometimes in accordance with her wishes, sometimes against them. As a rule marriage for her is a change for the worse; but if she does not dislike the bridegroom to the extent of availing herself of her prescriptive and real chance of escape, her natural feelings for her parents and relations would make it incumbent on her at least to affect a dutiful regret at leaving them (in cases where she does), by a half-bashful, half-serious resistance. It would be difficult to find a case of capture, whether in form or in fact, which is not readily explicable as simply the outcome of the natural affections and their protest against so artificial an arrangement as marriage by purchase; for with marriage by purchase the form of capture always co-exists, so that capture was not necessarily an earlier mode of marriage than that by purchase or agreement. The mock fights between the party of the bride and that of the bridegroom among so many Indian tribes;[323] the dances, lasting several days, during which it is the business of the squaws to keep the bridegroom at a distance from his bride, among the Tucanas of South America;[324] the similar duty which devolves on the matrons of the tribe at Sumatran weddings;[325] the mock skirmishes at Arab weddings, and the efforts of the negresses to keep the bridegroom away from the camel of the bride;[326] these are surely more intelligible, as arising from the rude ideas and customs of savage life, than as being survivals, artificially preserved, of a time when the bride was really fought for or stolen; and if such explanation is sufficient, should it not logically be admitted before resorting to the hypothesis of a practice whose very existence is rather an inference from such ceremonies than a cause observable in actual operation?
To pass to a third and quite distinct class of marriages by capture, in which the essential element is not maidenly bashfulness nor real repugnance, but the voluntary elopement of a girl with her lover, in defeat of a prior contract of betrothal. The large part which questions of profit and property play in savage betrothals can never be lost sight of, in estimating the causes of real wife abduction, either within or without the tribe. The primary conception of a daughter is a saleable possession, a source of profit, to her clan in marketings with other clans or to her parents in their bargains in her own clan. This fact alone militates against the supposition of the wide prevalence of female infanticide in primitive communities, the prejudice being rather in favour of killing the boys than the girls; not solely for the use of the latter as slaves and labourers, but for the price which even among Fuejians or Bushmen is payable in some form or another for their companionship as wives. Abiponian mothers spared their girls oftener than their boys, because their sons when grown up would want wherewithal to purchase a wife, and so tend to impoverish them; whilst their daughters would bring them in money by their sale in that capacity.[327] To raise the price by limiting the supply was also the reason why the Guanas of America preferred to bury their girls alive rather than their boys.[328]
From this view of daughters as saleable commodities comes polygamy for the rich, polyandry, or illicit elopement, for the poor. Among the Hos of India so high at one time was the price in cattle placed by parents on their daughters that the large number of adult unmarried girls became a ‘very peculiar feature in the social state of every considerable village of the KohlÁn.’ What, then, was the result? That ‘young men counteracted the machinations of avaricious parents against the course of true love by forcibly carrying off the girl,’ thus avoiding extortion by running away with her. The parents in such cases had to submit to terms proposed by arbitrators; but at last wife-abduction became so common that it could only be checked by the limitation by general consent of the number of cattle payable at marriage.[329]
‘A very singular scene,’ it is said, ‘may sometimes be noticed in the markets of Singbhoom. A young man suddenly makes a pounce on a girl and carries her off bodily, his friends covering the retreat (like a group from the picture of the Rape of the Sabines). This is generally a summary method of surmounting the obstacles that cruel parents may have placed in the lovers’ path; but though it is sometimes done in anticipation of the favourable inclination of the girl herself, and in spite of her struggles and tears, no disinterested person interferes, and the girls, late companions of the abducted maiden, often applaud the exploit.’[330]
In Afghanistan the pecuniary value of women has given rise to the curious custom of assessing part of the fines in criminal cases in a certain number of young women payable in atonement as wives to the plaintiff or to his relations from the family of the defendant. Thus murder is or was expiated by the payment of twelve young women; the cutting off a hand, an ear, or a nose by that of six; the breaking of a tooth by that of three; a wound above the forehead by that of one. This was the logical result of the state of thought which produces wife-purchase; but there was also another. For in the country parts, where matches generally begin in attachment, an enterprising lover may avoid the obstacle of parental consent by a form of capture, which has a legal sanction, though it does not exempt the captor from subsequent payment. This consists in a man’s ‘seizing an opportunity of cutting off a lock of her (the woman’s) hair, snatching away her veil, or throwing a sheet over her, and claiming her as his affianced wife.’ But the most common expedient is an ordinary elopement; though this is held an outrage to a family equivalent to the murder of one of its members; and being pursued with the same rancour, is often the cause of long and bloody wars between the clans; for as the fugitive couple are never refused an asylum, ‘the seduction of a woman of one Oolooss by a man of another, or a man’s eloping with a girl of his own Oolooss,’ is the commonest cause of feuds between the clans.[331]
Love attachments, in defeat of parental plans, lead to very similar results in Bokhara. For ‘the daughter of a Turcoman has a high price; and the swain, in despair of making a legitimate purchase, seizes his sweetheart, seats her behind him on the same horse, and gallops off to the nearest camp, where the parties are united, and separation is impossible. The parents and relations pursue the lovers, and the marriage is adjusted by an intermarriage with some female relation of the bridegroom, while he himself becomes bound to pay so many camels and horses as the price of his bride.’[332]
There is, therefore, evidence to justify the theory that the form of capture may often be explained as an attempt to regulate by law the danger to a tribe arising from too frequent elopements, naturally resulting from the abuse of the parental right of selling daughters. In Sumatra the defeat of matrimonial plans by an elopement with a preferred suitor is so common as to be sanctioned and regulated by law, being known as the system of marriage by telari gadis; the father in such a case having to pay the fine to which he would have been liable for bestowing his daughter after engagement to another suitor, and only being allowed to recover her, if he catches her in immediate pursuit. ‘When the parties,’ says Mr. McLennan, ‘cannot agree about the price, nothing is more common among the Kalmucks, Kirghiz, Nogais, and Circassians than to carry the lady off by actual force of arms. The wooer having once got the lady into his yurt, she is his wife by the law, and peace is established by her relations coming to terms as to the price.’ So too in England, elopements have often preceded and promoted more definite marriage settlements, or, with some slight observances, have stood legally as a substitute for them.
Considering, then, that the affections and wishes do not count for nothing even among savages; considering that among savages, more even than in civilized life, marriage is a question of property and of means, so that, whilst the richest members of a tribe almost universally have several wives, it is often all that the poorer can do to get a wife at all, we have a set of circumstances leading naturally sometimes to voluntary elopement on the part of the girl, in defeat of her parents, sometimes to literal wife-capture by a man otherwise unable to become a husband. This condition of things leads of necessity to polyandry and wife-robbery. In some Australian tribes, owing to a disproportion between the sexes, many men have to steal a wife from a neighbouring horde. But it is not their normal recognized mode of marriage. On the contrary, their laws on this subject are somewhat elaborate; and as it appears that before that state of society in which a daughter belongs to her father there is one in which she belongs to her mother, and perhaps a still prior state in which she belongs to her tribe, so from their birth Australian girls are appropriated to certain males of the tribe, nor can the parents annul the obligation. If the male dies the mother may then bestow her daughter on whom she will, for by the death of her legal owner the girl becomes to some extent the property of her relations, who have certain claims on her services for the procurement of food. But to the surrender of a girl by her mother the full consent of the whole tribe is necessary; and if, as sometimes happens, ‘the young people, listening rather to the dictates of inclination than those of law, improvise a marriage by absconding together,’ they incur the fatal enmity of the whole tribe.[333] According to Bonwick, a Tasmanian or Australian woman was never stolen contrary to her expectations or wishes. Only if all other schemes to have her own way failed, would a girl face the penalty of having ‘the spear of the disappointed, the spear of the guardian, and the spears of the tribe’ thrown at her, for her breach of tribal law.[334]
The conception of the daughters of a clan as its property, as a source of contingent wealth to it, of additional income to it in sheep, dogs, or whatever the medium of exchange, tends to keep up in many cases that prohibition to marry in the same clan or subdivision of a tribe which is known as exogamy. Among the Hindu Kafirs it is said to be uncertain why a man may not sell his girls to his own tribe, and why a man must always buy his wife from another; but it is certain that for this reason the more girls a man has born to him the better he is pleased and the richer his tribe becomes.[335] A Khond father distributes among the heads of the families, belonging to his branch of a tribe, the sum raised on behalf of a son-in-law by subscription from the son-in-law’s branch. But, supposing a great inequality of wealth to arise between different clans, originally united by profitable intermarriages, it might become more profitable to sell within the clan than outside it, so that the same motives of interest which, under some circumstances, would tend to encourage exogamy would under others lead to the opposite principle, a rich bridegroom of the same clan being preferable to a poor one of another, whether the gain accrued to a girl’s parents or her clan. It is, perhaps, for this reason that a Hindu Kooch incurs a fine if he marries a woman of another clan, becoming a bondsman till his wife redeems him; that is, till she pays back to his clan or its chief what the bridegroom, by purchasing her, has alienated from the use of the tribe.[336] On the other hand, the reason given by the Khonds for marrying women from distant places was, that they gave much smaller sums than for women of their own tribe.[337]
Exogamy and endogamy would thus co-exist, as the customs of tribes that have attained to a more or less complete recognition of the rights of property, and are so far advanced as to be capable of preserving complex rules of social organization. Marriages, therefore, under either rÉgime are matters generally of friendly settlement, of ordinary contract; and where such arrangements are defeated by the perversity of the principal parties—namely, the bride or the bridegroom—what more natural than the device of giving legal sanction to an elopement by settling a subsequent compensation with the parent?
The custom of exogamy is so widely spread over the world that its origin must be sought in conditions as prevalent as itself, and it is possible that it arose out of the same condition which certainly sustains it and is co-extensive with itself, namely, from the marketable position of women. That female infanticide should have led to it is improbable, not only from the comparative rarity of the practice among the rudest tribes, but from the negative instance of the Todas, a wild Indian hill-tribe, who, notwithstanding the scarcity of their women, and a scarcity actually attributed to former female infanticide, ‘never contract marriage with the other tribes, though living together on most friendly terms.’[338] Judging À priori, we should expect to find as of earlier date a prejudice in favour of tribal exclusiveness, of strict endogamy. The idea of the Abors that marriage out of the clan is a sin only to be washed out by sacrifice—a sin so great as to cause war among the elements, and even obscuration of the sun and moon—has a more archaic appearance than the contrary principle; and the confinement of marriages to a few families of known purity of descent is characteristic of some of the lowest Hindu castes.[339] The prejudice against foreign women is so strong that there is often a tendency to regard female prisoners of war as merely slaves, as not of the same rank with the real wives of their captors. Thus, ‘though the different tribes of the Aht nation are frequently at war with one another, women are not captured from other tribes for marriage, but only to be kept as slaves. The idea of slavery connected with capture is so common that a free-born Aht would hesitate to marry a woman taken in war, whatever her rank had been in her own tribe.’[340] The Caribs, too, if they kept female prisoners as wives always regarded them as slaves, as standing on a lower level than their legitimate wives.[341]
Leaving, however, the obscure problem of the origin of exogamy, there is a point of view from which both that and endogamy are one. For exogamy as regards the subdivisions of a tribe is endogamy as regards the tribe itself, tending in fact to preserve tribal unity and to check an indefinite divergency of interests and dialects. For example, where a Hindoo caste or tribe is composed of several Gotrams, no person of whom may marry an individual of the same Gotram, it is evident that the unity of the tribe is actually sustained by the exogamy of its constituent parts. Such a custom therefore, howsoever originated, would, as serviceable in maintaining tribal unity against hostile neighbouring people, tend to survive from motives of common expediency, from its adaptation to the interests of peace; a beneficial result of the system which in Mr. Bancroft’s account of the Thlinkeet and Kutchin Indians clearly appears.[342] The Thlinkeets are nationally divided into two great clans, under the totems of the Wolf and the Raven, and these two are again subdivided into numerous sub-totems. ‘In this clanship some singular social facts present themselves. People are at once thrust widely apart and yet drawn together. Tribes of the same clan may not war on each other, but at the same time members of the same clan may not marry each other. Thus the young Wolf warrior must seek his mate among the Ravens.... Obviously this singular social fancy tends greatly to keep the various tribes of the nation at peace.’ The Kutchins, again, are divided into three castes, resident in different territories, no two persons of the same caste being allowed to marry. ‘This system operates strongly against war between the tribes, as in war it is caste against caste, not tribe against tribe. As the father is never of the same caste as the son, who receives clanship from the mother, there can never be international war without ranging fathers and sons against each other.’ So among the Khonds, who punish intermarriage between persons of the same tribe with death, the intervention of the women was always essential to peace, as they were neutral between the tribe of their fathers and that of their husbands.[343] But it is difficult to think that, if hostile relations between exogamous clans became permanent, the several clans would still insist on exogamous marriages as the only marriages legally valid, and consequently regard the use of force or fraud as the only legitimate title to a wife.
It seems indeed certain that wherever the rule of exogamy exists it may be analysed into a prohibition to marry within the divisions of a larger group; that larger group being consciously recognised as uniting the divergent families by resemblance of dialect, common political ties, or a traditional common descent. The Kalmucks, for instance, call themselves ‘the peculiar people,’ or ‘the four allies,’ and any danger of their national dissolution is obviously diminished by the very fact of the exogamy of their four clans. The Circassians, whose constituent brotherhoods are exogamous, by the occasional assemblies of the brotherhoods for the settlement of disputes, show a consciousness of their political unity, which by the exogamy of the brotherhoods they help to maintain. The Hindu castes preserve their mutual exclusiveness by the very fact of compelling all their constituent families to intermingle in marriage, and so preventing any one of them from dissolving the common relationship by absolute separation or independent growth. So that exogamy rather sustains than prevents a system of marriages within the same stock, and is a mark of a higher conception of social organisation, when people have learned to classify themselves with respect to their neighbours, when tribal and personal property is well established, and when, consequently, marriages between the groups can be effected by purchase better than by violence. Exogamy therefore as the product or concomitant of a somewhat advanced state of thought, not of utter barbarism, would never make marriages by capture a necessity of existence; but, if it did, it would argue so much culture in a tribe capable of maintaining such rules, as would equally justify us in ascribing to them moral feelings, not less advanced and refined than those involved in their adherence to so restrictive a political system.
South Australia supplies a typical illustration of the confusion relating to intertribal marriages which arises from the vague use of the word tribe. For wherever there is reason to suspect that the word clan or family should stand for the word tribe, it is probable that the exogamy predicated of the tribe only prevails between its constituent elements; in other words, that it is only, as among the Kalmucks, Circassians, or Hindu castes, an extended form of the principle of endogamy. Thus, Collins, describing wife-capture in New South Wales, says that ‘it is believed’ the women so taken are always selected from women of a different tribe from that of the males, and from one with whom they are at enmity; that as wives ‘they are incorporated into the tribes to which their husbands belong, and but seldom quit them for others.’ But he uses the word tribe as convertible with the word family, as when he speaks of the natives near Port Jackson being distributed into families, each under the government of its own head, and deriving its name from its place of residence.[344] And the statements of Captain Hunter, a previous writer, that the natives are associated ‘in tribes of many families together,’ living apparently without a fixed residence; that ‘the tribe takes its name, from the place of their general residence;’ and that, the different families wander in different directions for food, but unite on occasion of disputes with another tribe, make it still more probable that when Collins spoke of different tribes he meant merely, different families, or groups, which with all their separate wanderings united sometimes in cases of common danger. So when Captain Hunter himself says that ‘there is some reason to suppose that most of their wives are taken by force from the tribes with whom they are at variance, as the females bear no proportion to the males,’ we may take it that by tribes he means families, and families who recognise their community of blood when a really different tribe provokes their hostility by assembling as a tribe themselves.[345] Mr. Stanbridge, who spent eighteen years in the wilds of Victoria, corroborates this view; for, according to him, each tribe has its own boundaries, the land of which is parcelled out amongst families and carefully transmitted by direct descent; these boundaries being so sacredly maintained that the member of no one family will venture on the lands of a neighbouring one without invitation. The several families (or tribes) unite for mutual purposes under a chief. The women often, but not always, marry into distant tribes; they are generally betrothed in their infancy, but if they grow up unbetrothed the father’s consent must be solicited; failing him, the brother’s; then the uncle’s; and last of all that of a council or a chief of a tribe.[346] That force was ever the normal method by which marriages were effected in Australia, there is no proof; that, on the contrary, mutual likings often set the law, is proved by the story of the native captive girl, who, after living among the colonists for some time, expressed a desire to go away and be married to a young native of her acquaintance; albeit that she left him after three days, returning sadly beaten and jealous of the other wife.[347]
Quite distinct, again, either from the real or pretended reluctance of a savage girl to become a bride, or from the custom of forcing an avaricious parent to a settlement by the shorter process of taking first and paying afterwards, is the custom of stealing women from the same or a neighbouring clan, a custom which prevailed widely in Ireland and Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which in the latter country has been ‘glorified in a whole literature of songs and ballads.’[348]
That polygamy and wife-purchase and artificial tribal regulations often lead to such a result cannot be denied; but that it is anywhere a system, sustained by prejudices, whencesoever derived, seems completely unwarranted by the evidence hitherto collected. The Coinmen of Patagonia, who made annual inroads on the Tekeenica tribe, killing the men and carrying off not only the women but the children, dogs, arrows, spears, and canoes, seem to have been actuated rather by the ordinary motives of freebooters (by such motives, for instance, as induced our early convict settlers in Tasmania to set off with their bullock-chains to make captives of the native women[349]) than by any scruples of marrying relations at home. Carib wives taken in war were accounted slaves; and so far were the Caribs from being dependent on aggression for their wives, that before their customs were modified by acquaintance with the Christians their only legitimate wives were their cousins.[350] If a man had no cousin to marry, or put off doing so till it was too late, he might then marry some non-relative, with the consent of her parents. At the festival that followed a successful war the parents vied with one another in offering their daughters as wives to those who were praised by their captains as having fought with bravery. The Caribs of the continent differed from those of the islands in that men and women spoke the same language, not having corrupted their native tongue by marriages with foreign women.[351] According to Humboldt, the language of the Caribs of the continent was the same, from the source of the Rio Branco to the steppes of Cumana; and the pride of race which led them to withdraw from every other people, and was the cause of the failure of all missionary efforts that tried to combine them with villages containing people of another nation and speaking another idiom, would surely have militated against making exogamy a preliminary condition of matrimony.[352] Humboldt, indeed, says that polygamy was more extensively practised by the Caribs and other nations that ‘preserved the custom of carrying off young girls from the neighbouring tribe;’ but it would be contrary to all previous accounts of the people to suppose these were their only wives, such a supplement to domestic felicity being everywhere the common reward, though seldom the chief object, of successful war. The curious difference in the language of the men and of the women found to exist among the Caribs of the West Indian Archipelago, and attributed by tradition to the conquest of a former people on the islands, whose wives the conquerors appropriated, has perhaps been rather exaggerated, for in a list of 488 words and phrases employed by both sexes, in only 36 is there any difference marked between the language of the men and that of the women. The origin of the difference may be doubted, as there were also words and phrases used by the old men of the people which the younger ones might not use; and there was a war-dialect of which neither women, girls, or boys had any knowledge.[353] But probably the difference arose from a custom similar to that of the Zulus, which makes it unlawful for a woman to use any word containing the sound of her father-in-law’s name or of the names of her husband’s male relations. ‘Whenever the emphatic syllable of either of their proper names occurs in any other word, she must avoid it, by either substituting an entirely new word, or at least another syllable in its place. Hence this custom has given rise to an almost distinct language among the women.’[354] In consequence of this Hlonipa custom, according to another witness, ‘the language at this present time almost presents the phenomenon of a double one.’[355] That the Caribs maintained the common etiquette of reserve between parents and children-in-law,[356] makes it not improbable that the reserve extended itself to their language, and thus produced the same phenomenon that we find in South Africa.
In the same way other cases of wife-capture appear simply in the light of savage lawlessness, which may have been more common among quite primitive tribes than it is in their nearest modern representatives; but which, if it ever was widely prevalent, is most unlikely to have been perpetuated in symbol, by a form of capture. If then the form is easily explicable on other grounds, such as have been suggested, we have a reason the less for supposing in the past a state of things which would exclude from the relations between male and female the happy influence of that mutual affection which has been shown not to have been entirely absent even among, perhaps, the rudest of our species, the aborigines of Australia or the Veddahs of Ceylon, and which is certainly disseminated more or less widely, outside the human race, through a large part of the animal creation.
It is probably impossible to resuscitate in imagination a picture of primitive times. It is with the lower societies of the world as with the lower animal organisms: the more they are studied, the more wonderful is the complexity of structure they unfold. Tribal and subtribal divisions of communities, tribal and subtribal divisions of territory, strong distinctions of rank, stringent rules of etiquette, are found on all sides to characterise populations in other circumstances of life scarcely less rude than the brute creation around them. The first beginnings of social evolution are lost, nor can they be observed in any known races that appear to have advanced the least distance from the starting-point of progress. But, as there is no reason to suppose that the external conditions of primitive man were ever very different from those of existing tribes; that those, for instance, of the shell-mound builders or the cave-dwellers differed widely from those of existing Ahts or Bushmen, so there is nothing unreasonable in believing, that the earliest human denizens of the globe were endowed with the same rudiments of feelings that prevail among them, and that these should, even in very early times, have produced very similar social institutions. That Greeks and Egyptians, Chinese and Hindus, had legends ascribing marriage to the invention of a particular legislator, thereby implying there was a time when marriage was not, no more proves that there was ever a time when some sort of marriage was unrecognised than the many legends of the origin of fire prove that mankind were ever destitute of the blessing of its warmth. A minimum of reflection on the subject would produce the legend, just as reflections on the world’s origin have produced countless legends of its creation, of a time when it too was nonexistent. And it will be found, wherever any known savage tribe really practises no wedding customs, that the fact of the marriage is distinctly recognised, either by payment in kind or labour by the bridegroom or by some symbolical act notifying the union to all fellow-tribesmen. The Veddahs, for instance, according to Tennant, used no marriage rites; but another writer mentions, that on the day of marriage the husband received from his bride a cord twisted by herself, which he had to wear round his waist till his death, as a symbol of the lastingness of the union between them. The Kherias of India, who have no word for marriage in their language, give public recognition to the fact by certain rites and festivities, closely analogous to those in vogue in neighbouring tribes. The Coroadas of Brazil have no marriage solemnity, but the suitor presents the bride’s parents with fruit or game, as a tacit engagement to support her by the chase. Such a tacit expression of willingness and ability to take good care of his wife is a common symbolical act among savages, even the rudest; whilst the fact that for the married pair henceforth there will be a union of life and fortune is indicated by many a wedding custom, of no doubtful meaning, as by the eating of a cake together, or by the Dyak custom of making the married couple sit together on two bars of iron, ‘to intimate the wish of the bystanders that blessings as lasting and health as vigorous as that metal may attend the pair.’
But symbolical acts like these—and they might be multiplied indefinitely—presuppose an advanced state of thought and feeling, behind which we cannot get in the observation of any existing savage tribes; and since they are common wherever the pretence of capture is common, that pretence may well be symbolical too; but symbolical, not of an earlier system of marriage, but of a conventional regard for good manners. Wherever the pretence of capture exists, it exists amid conditions of life so far removed from what might naturally be conceived as the most archaic, that it is quite legitimate to attribute the decorous reluctance of the bride and the resistance of her relations at weddings to such feelings as have been proved to prevail upon such occasions, and so to consider the bride’s behaviour as something quite unconnected with the lawless practice of wife-abduction, a practice which undoubtedly prevails to a certain extent in the savage world (chiefly in consequence of artificial social arrangements), which may have prevailed to a still greater extent when men lived in the caves of PÉrigord or upon former continents, but which it is incredible should ever have survived by transmission as a symbol, as a custom worthy of religious preservation.
