A minute investigation of the extent to which female infanticide is practised has convinced me that Mr. McLennan has much exaggerated the importance of this custom. It certainly prevails in many parts of the world; and it is true that, as a rule, female children are killed rather than male. But there is nothing to indicate that infanticide has ever been so nearly universal, or has anywhere been practised on so large a scale as Mr. McLennan’s hypothesis presupposes. Among a great many existing savage peoples it is almost unheard of—as, for instance, among the Tuski,[1862] Ahts,[1863] Western Eskimo,[1864] Botocudos,[1865] and in certain tribes of California.[1866] Among some of these peoples new-born children are killed now and then—in case of the birth of twins, if the children are weak and deformed, or for some other reason—but always, it is said, without distinction of sex. Among the Dacotahs and Crees, female infanticide is only occasionally committed.[1867] The Blackfeet, according to Richardson, believe that women who have been guilty of this crime will never reach the happy mountain after death, but are compelled to hover round the seats of their crimes, with branches of trees tied to their legs;[1868] and the Aleuts think that a child-murder brings misfortune on the whole village.[1869] Among the Abipones, the women often practised infanticide, but it was the boy who was generally thus sacrificed, for when a son grew up it was necessary to buy a wife for him, while a grown-up daughter would always command her price.[1870]
In Africa I do not know of a single district where the people are in the habit of destroying new-born children. Herr Valdau tells us of a Bakundu woman who, accused of such a deed, was condemned to death.[1871]
Until the introduction of Christianity, the South Sea Islanders practised infanticide probably to a greater extent than any other people with whose history we are acquainted. But as the motive was often want of food for the infant, or interference with the personal charms of the wife, or the disagreeableness of baby life, boys as well as girls were killed. Moreover, in Samoa, in the Mitchell’s and Hervey Groups, and in part of New Guinea, infanticide was quite unheard of;[1872] whilst, in most of the islands belonging to the Solomon Group, it occurs only in extreme cases, such as that of the child being a bastard.[1873] In the Caroline Islands, according to Chamisso, “the prince would have the unnatural mother punished with death.”[1874] And even in Australia, where, according to Mr. Curr’s belief, the women reared as a rule, only two boys and one girl, the rest being destroyed,[1875] there seem to be tribes in which the killing of children rarely happens.[1876]
There are other reasons, besides those just given, for doubting whether infanticide can ever have been so common as Mr. McLennan suggests. It may be assumed, as Mr. Darwin remarks, that during the earliest period of human development man did not partially lose one of the strongest of instincts, common to all the lower animals, namely the love of their young, and consequently did not practise infanticide.[1877] Later on, the women, far from being useless to the savage tribe, rendered valuable services as food-providers. Mr. Fison, who has lived among uncivilized races for many years, thinks it will be found that female infanticide is far less common among the lower savages than it is among the more advanced tribes.[1878] And, speaking of one of the very rudest, the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, Mr. Bridges states that it occurred only occasionally among them, and then was almost always the deed of the mother, who acted from “jealousy, or hatred of her husband, or because of desertion and wretchedness.”[1879] Moreover, it is very generally asserted that certain Californians never committed infanticide before the arrival of the whites;[1880] whilst Ellis thinks that there is every reason to suppose that this custom was practised less extensively by the Polynesians during the early periods of their history than it was afterwards.[1881]
But even if Mr. McLennan were right in his assumption that savages everywhere used to kill female infants, this would not explain the origin of exogamy. “In time,” he says, “it came to be considered improper, because it was unusual, for a man to marry a woman of his own group.”[1882] But why should such a marriage ever have become unusual? Why should the men have refrained from marrying those women of their own tribe who were not killed? Why should they have made these beings whom they considered so useless, even more useless than they naturally were, by preventing them from becoming mothers of sons who would have increased the strength of the tribe? That the men may have endeavoured to make up the deficiency of women by capturing wives from foreign tribes is conceivable enough; but it is hard to see why intercourse with women of their own tribe should on this account have been prohibited, sometimes even on pain of death.
That the horror of incest is innate in the human race seems as improbable to Mr. Herbert Spencer as to Mr. McLennan. According to Mr. Spencer, this feeling is a result of evolution gradually acquired. Primitive groups of men, he says, are habitually hostile. In all times and places victory is followed by pillage; whatever portable things of worth the conquerors find they take. And of course they take women as they take other booty, because women are prized as wives, as concubines, or as drudges. A captured woman, besides her intrinsic value, has an extrinsic value: “like a native wife she serves as a slave, but unlike a native wife, she serves also as a trophy.” Hence members of the tribe thus married to foreign women are held to be more honourably married than those married to native women. If the tribe, becoming successful in war, robs adjacent tribes of their women more frequently, there will then grow up the idea that the now considerable class having foreign wives form the honourable class, and non-possession of a foreign wife will come to be regarded as a proof of cowardice. “An increasing ambition to get foreign wives will therefore arise; and as the number of those who are without them decreases, the brand of disgrace attaching to them will grow more decided; until in the most warlike tribes, it becomes an imperative requirement that a wife shall be obtained from another tribe—if not in open war, then by private abduction.”[1883]
This interpretation is open to an objection similar to that which may be brought against Mr. McLennan’s hypothesis. Even if it became customary for a tribe to rob foreign tribes of their women, we have no reason to believe that it therefore became customary not to marry native women. Plurality of wives is for savage man a source of wealth and reputation; even the wretched Fuegian endeavours to procure as many as possible in order to obtain rowers for his canoe. Hence it could scarcely be considered disgraceful to have some native wives besides those of foreign birth. If Mr. Spencer’s explanation is the correct one, what a deplorable lot it must have been for a woman to belong to a tribe always successful in war! She had of course to live unmarried till she was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of some hostile suitor. But this would seldom happen, if the adjacent weaker tribes were habitually worsted in war. In such tribes, according to Mr. Spencer, “marrying within the tribe will not only be habitual, but there will arise a prejudice, and eventually a law, against taking wives from other tribes.”[1884]
Least of all can Mr. Spencer’s hypothesis explain the origin of prohibitions of marriage between the nearest kin. It presupposes that the tribe has been frequently successful in war during so long a period that usage has had time to grow into law. But since such prohibitions are practically common to all mankind, they cannot have originated in the way suggested, because when there is a vanquisher there must also be a vanquished. Moreover, it is impossible to suppose that that powerful feeling which restrains parents from marrying their children, brothers from marrying their sisters, can have been due to man’s vain desire to have a trophy in his wife.[1885]
Sir John Lubbock explains the origin of exogamy in a quite different way. Believing that in man’s primitive state all the men of a tribe were married to all the women, and that no one could appropriate one of them to himself without infringing on the general rights of the tribe, he suggests that women taken in war from a foreign tribe were in a different position. The tribe, as a tribe, had no right to these women, and they would become wives in our sense of the term.[1886]
It is unnecessary to say much about this hypothesis, as it stands or falls with Sir J. Lubbock’s theory of “communal marriage.” Why should women taken in war have been the men’s personal property, if the women of the tribe were not so? As Mr. McLennan justly remarks, war-captives are usually obtained by group-acts, or quasi group-acts; hence capture would be recognized as a regular mode of adding women to the group, subject to the customary rights of its male members; and every man in the group would claim the communal right to women taken by others.[1887]