The system and the vocabulary of kinship were then renewed; to the classificatory mode, grouping the relations by classes, without much care as to consanguinity, has succeeded the descriptive mode, which carefully specifies the degree of consanguinity of each person, and distinguishes a direct line from collateral lines, and in which each individual is the centre of a group of relations.
In a remarkable book, which has not yet had all the success it deserves, Lewis Morgan believes he has recognised five stages in the evolution of the family: 1st, the family is consanguineous—that is to say, founded on the marriage of brothers and sisters of a group; 2nd, several brothers are the common husbands of their wives, who are not sisters; 3rd, a man and woman unite, but without exclusive cohabitation, and with faculty of divorce for one or the other; 4th, then comes the pastoral family of the Hebrews, the marriage of one man with several women; but this patriarchal form has not been universal; 5th, at last appeared the family of civilised societies, the most modern, characterised by the exclusive cohabitation of one man and one woman. Not taking this classification too literally, and reserving a place for varieties and exceptions, we have here five stages which mark tolerably well the evolution of the family in humanity.
The moral direction of this slow transformation is evident; it proceeds from a communism more or less extensive to individualism; from the clan, where all is solidarity, to the family and the individual, having their own interests, which are as distinct as possible from those of other families and other individuals. Each one has endeavoured to get for himself as large a share as possible of that which was formerly held in common; each man has aimed at obtaining a more and more exclusive right over property, wife, and children. From these appetites, more economic than ethereal, have at length proceeded the patriarchal family, monogamy, and familial property, and later, individual property;[1109] the régime of the family and that of property have evolved in company. But this transformation has been effected by extremely slow degrees; for a long time the new régime bore the mark of the old one in certain rights reserved to the clan, in certain prohibitions, in certain obligations, which still imposed some solidarity on individuals—as, for example, the legal injunction to help a man in peril, to hasten to the assistance of a village plundered by robbers, the general duty of hospitality, etc.—all of them precepts formulated by the codes of Egypt and India, and still to be found in Kabylie, and which have disappeared from our frankly individualistic, or rather egoistic, modern legislations.
It is indisputable that this evolution has everywhere coincided with a general progress in civilisation, and the advance has been sensibly the same among the peoples of all races, on the sole condition that they should have emerged from savagery. Everywhere, in the end, the paternal family and monogamic marriage have become a sort of ideal to which men have striven to conform their customs and institutions. It has very naturally been concluded that these last forms of the family and of conjugal union have an intrinsic sociologic superiority over the others, that in all times and places they strengthen the ethnic group, and create for it better conditions in its struggle for existence. But this reasoning has nothing strict in it; civilisation is the result of very complex influences, and if a certain social practice has been adopted by inferior races, it does not logically follow that it is, for that reason only, bad in itself. What seems indisputable is, that man tends willingly towards individualism, and yields himself up to it with joy as soon as that becomes possible to him, thanks to the general progress of civilisation. At the origin of civilisations, in a tribe of savages, surrounded with perils, and painfully struggling for existence, a more or less strict solidarity is imperative; the co-associates must necessarily form as it were a large family, in which a more or less communal régime is essential. The children, the weak ones, and the women have more chance of surviving if in some measure they belong to the entire clan; perpetual war soon cuts down a great number of men; it is therefore necessary that their widows and children should find support and protection without difficulty, and the régime of the clan, with its wide and confused kinship, lends itself better to this helpful fraternity than a strict distinction of tuum and meum applied to property and persons. The same may be said of patriarchal polygamy, which often flourished on the ruins of the clan. For this régime to become general, it is necessary that, in the ethnic group, the proportion of the sexes should be to the advantage of the feminine sex; in this case it is imperative, and evidently becomes favourable to the maintenance of the social body; in fact it guarantees the women against desertion, augments the number of births, and assures to the children the care of one or more adoptive mothers, if the real mother happens to die. The opinion of Herbert Spencer, who quite à priori attributes to monogamy a diminution in the mortality of children,[1110] is a most hazardous one. By the last census taken in Algeria we learn, not without surprise, that the increase in the indigenous Mussulman and polygamic population was much superior to that of the most prolific of the European monogamous states. Polygamy may therefore have its utilitarian value, and this is the case as soon as it adapts itself to the general conditions of social life.
II. The Present.
It is many centuries since Europe adopted monogamic marriage as the legal type of the sexual union. That there exists by the side of regular marriage a considerable margin, in which are still found nearly all the other forms of sexual association, we do not deny; but in France, for example, two-thirds of the population live so entirely under the régime of legal monogamy, that it would be evidently superfluous to describe it here; it is, in substance, the Roman marriage, the bonds of which Christianity has striven to lighten. In the general opinion, marriage such as our laws and customs require it to be, is the most perfect type possible of conjugal union; and this current appreciation has not been a little strengthened by a learned treatise, frequently quoted, and of which I cannot dispense with saying a few words.
In 1859, a justly celebrated demographer, whom I have the honour to call friend, Dr. Adolphe Bertillon, published a monograph on marriage, which made a great sensation.[1111]
This work, bristling with figures, scrupulously collected and strictly accurate, proves or seems to prove that the celibate third of the French population is, by reason of its celibacy, struck with decay, and plays the part of an inferior race by the side of the married two-thirds. In comparative tables, which are extremely clear, A. Bertillon follows step by step the different fates of the married and unmarried, and he shows us that at every age the celibate population is struck by a mortality nearly twice as great as the other; that its births merely make up 45 per cent. of its annual losses; that it counts every year twice as many cases of madness, twice as many suicides, twice as many attempts on property, and twice as many murders and acts of personal violence. Consequently, the State has to maintain for this celibate population twice as many prisons, twice as many asylums and hospitals, twice as many undertakers,[1112] etc. These revelations, absolutely true as raw results, caused a great commotion in the little public specially occupied with demography and sociology. Their alarm was soon calmed.
From his interesting work A. Bertillon had drawn conclusions which were very doubtful, taking surely the effect for the cause, by attributing the inferiority of the celibate population solely to its celibacy. If this be so, we have only to marry these weak ones in order to raise them; but the superiority of the married population, which on the whole is indisputable, does not necessarily imply the superiority of the marriage state.
It is in consequence of economic hindrances, and of physical or psychical inferiority, that, in the greater number of cases, people resign themselves to celibacy. Those who wish to marry cannot always do so, and A. Bertillon knew better than any one that the number of marriages, the age at marriage, the number of children by marriage, etc., depend in the mass not on individual caprice, but on causes altogether general. Setting aside money considerations—which are so powerful, and to which I shall presently return—and confining our calculation to persons of normal endowment, it is probable that there is more energy, more moral and intellectual vitality, in those who bravely face the risk of marriage than in the timid celibates; but it is certain that the celibate population, taken as a whole, includes the majority of the human waste of a country. At the time when A. Bertillon wrote his learned treatise, in 1859, statistics prove the existence in France of 370,018 infirm persons,[1113] of whom the greater number were evidently condemned to celibacy by the very fact of their infirmity. On the other hand, it is probable that among the beggars, properly so called, there is a large proportion of celibates, without counting the infirm; now in 1847 there were 337,838 beggars in France.[1114]