But these are usages of the system as it stands to-day. Is there behind it an 'undivided commune,' as Mr. Morgan held; is there actual 'group marriage'? I am not apt to believe that there is. Language shows, in the terms of relationship, a group of 'Mothers' for each child; but, as Mr. Darwin remarks, 'it seems almost incredible that the relationship of the child to its mother should ever have been completely ignored, especially as the women in most savage tribes nurse their infants for a long time.' A man's mother is one, and must be known, though he calls many women by the same name as he gives to his mother. She is lumped, in the terms of relationship, in one term with all the women whom the father might legally have married, but did not. The son, in addressing or speaking of his mother, overlooks the 'one love which needs no winning,' and his term has reference only to the present marriage law of his tribe. That law 'codifies' the terms, they result from that law, and that law, again, is based, if I am right, on totem prohibitions, on the desire to keep marriage between people of the same generation, and on the rights and duties of the generations. These prohibitions, of phratry, 'class,' totem, and age, leave only a certain set of women marriageable to a certain set of men. The name of this set of women is Nupa to their coevals, Luka to the succeeding generation. There is no name for 'wife,' no name for 'mother;' there are only names expressive of customary legal status, itself the result of the existing rules. Whatever their original sense, they all now connote seniority and customary legal status, with its reciprocal duties, rights and avoidances. 'It is the system, and not group marriage, which has given rise to these terms of relationship,' says Mr. Crawley.[19]
But what gave rise to the system? Mr. Fison has told us. 1. 'The division of a tribe (community) into two exogamous intermarrying classes....' 2. 'The subdivision of these two classes into four,' or, he suggests, the amalgamation of two tribes. 3. 'Their subdivision into gentes distinguished by totems.'[20]
But all of this theory we have already declined to accept for reasons given, and mainly because it involves (as I try to show) deliberate primeval reformatory legislation—without any conceivable motive. Again, we cannot accept Mr. Fison's system because it involves the hypothesis that a tribe, or 'community,' large enough to feel the necessity of bisecting itself for social and moral purposes, existed at a period when the difficulties of commissariat, of food supply, and of hostility, could seldom, if ever, permit its existence. A tribe is, I repeat, a local aggregate of small groups become friendly: it is not a primeval horde which keeps on subdividing itself, legislatively, for reformatory purposes. What social cement kept such a primeval horde, such an 'undivided commune,' together; and how did the animal jealousy of men so near to the brutal stage fail to rend it into pieces? How was it fed? How can we imagine a human herd—how supplied with food, who knows?—wherein each male sees each other male approach what female he pleases, perhaps his own preferred girl, without internecine jealousy? I cannot imagine this indifference to love in such a primitive Agapemone; I cannot understand its economics; any more than I can guess why such a state of affairs ever seemed—to its members—'abominable' and 'objectionable,' and a thing to be reformed; yet they 'bisected' it, and 'subdivided' the segments, all in the interests of morality—such is the theory.
As for the good-humoured laxity which enables all men and women to live together matrimonially at random, Mr. Morgan found an example, as he thought, in the Punalua of the Hawaiians. The word Punalua, when observed (1860) by Judge Andrews, meant 'dear friend,' or 'intimate companion.' A man called his sister's husband (our 'brother-in-law) his 'dear friend,' and a woman styled the wife of her husband's brother (her sister-in-law), her 'dear friend,' or Punalua. This shows that relations-in-law were not 'Foes-in-law,' or, at least, that this was not the official view of the case. It really does not follow that all the wives 'shared their remaining husbands in common.' Judge Andrews thought that this happy family 'were inclined to possess each other in common.' That was only the Judge's theory, also the theory of the Rev. Artemus Bishop. Probably there was a great deal of genial license and indifference among loose luxurious barbaric people, living in 'summer isles of Eden,' where food and necessaries were ready made by benignant Nature.[21]
Each shepherd clasped, with unconcealed delight,
His yielding fair, within the Captain's sight;
Each yielding fair, as chance or fancy led,
Preferred new lovers to her sylvan bed.[22]
This is vastly well, and the poet adds, in a liberal spirit,
What Otaheite is, let England be!
It is very well, but it by no means represents, probably, the manners of primitive man.
'We may conclude,' says Mr. Darwin, 'from what we know of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds,... that promiscuous intercourse, in a state of nature, is extremely improbable.... The most probable view is that primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla, for all the natives agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up a struggle takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community. The younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the same family,' just as the other male did.[23]