Yet in case I am mistaken here, let me say at once I am certain that this return to the restricted family was a necessary and inevitable step. The individual forces had to triumph. This may seem a contradiction to all I have just said. What I wish to show is this: one and all the phases in the development of society have been needful and fruitful as successive stages in growth; yet none can continue—none be regarded as the final stage, for each becomes insufficient and narrow from the standpoint of the needs of a later stage. We have reached the third stage—the patriarchal family which still endures. And last and hardest to eradicate is that monopoly of sexual possession, which says: “This woman and her children are mine: I have tabooed her for life.” Mankind has still to outlive this brute instinct in its upward way to civilisation.
FOOTNOTES:
[105] See Westermarck, op. cit., pp. 54-56.
[106] Starcke’s Primitive Family, pp. 85-88. Letourneau, Evolution of Marriage, pp. 80-81, 311-312. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, Vol. I, pp. 269, 288.
[107] Alice Werner, “Our Subject Races”, National Reformer, Aug. 1897, p. 169.
[108] Travels, p. 109.
[109] Lippert, Kulturgeschichte, etc., Vol. II, p. 57. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, Vol. I, pp. 274, 286.
[110] Letourneau, pp. 306-307; citing Laing, Travels in Western Africa.
[111] Giraud-Teulon, Les origines du mariage et de la famille, pp. 215 et seq.
[112] Hodgson, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1855, Vol. XVIII, p. 707, cited by Starcke, op. cit., pp. 79, 285.