After referring to a state of advanced social existence in which every person knowing what is right would feel an irresistible impulse toward right-living, Mr. Wallace remarks that among peoples low in the scale of development “we find some approaches to such a perfect social state.” He observes: “It is not too much to say that the mass of our population have not at all advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it.”
Most of the reports which come to us regarding the immorality of lower races are brought by missionaries, who, although unacquainted with the language, customs, and habits of thought of the peoples whose countries they visit, nevertheless feel called upon to furnish lengthy reports of those benighted races which are “utterly destitute of Christian training.”
As the restrictions on marriage among early peoples were limited to closely related groups, it is evident that the capture of wives was not carried on because of any established law of exogamy, neither was it practised because of the scarcity of women resulting from female infanticide nor because of a desire for recognized paternity. Wife-capture arose from a demand for foreign women, aliens, who, torn from their homes and deprived of the protection of their own kinsfolk, had no alternative but sexual slavery. These women were much more desirable than the free-born women of a man’s own tribe.
After having created a false and wholly unwarrantable hypothesis, an hypothesis in which exogamy and endogamy, two principles which as applied to tribes never existed, play a conspicuous part, Mr. McLennan has thrust nearly all the facts which he has observed relative to primitive society into false positions and forced them to do duty in bolstering up his thoroughly imaginative theory to account for the origin of wife-capture. It is perhaps needless to say that the whole subject, so far as his contribution is concerned, is as much a mystery as before he attempted a solution of the problem.
Sir John Lubbock, like J. F. McLennan, assumes that the earliest organization of society was that of the tribe, and that a man was first regarded as belonging only to a group. Subsequently, as the maternal bond is stronger than that which unites a father to his offspring, kinship with his mother and her relations was established. In course of time he was accounted as a descendant of his father only, and lastly he became equally related to both parents.