When told that these children were born at annual intervals, and that such occurrences were common in Europe, they were very much shocked, and thought it explained sufficiently why so many white people were “mere shrimps.” After childbirth, among the Fijians, husband and wife separate and live apart for three and even four years, “so that no other baby may interfere with the time considered necessary for suckling the children, in order to make them strong and healthy.”[78]
Through such wise regulations as these, governing the sexual relations, the drain on the vital forces observed among the women of civilized countries is avoided, and it was doubtless to these rules and others of a similar character that women, throughout untold ages of human existence, were enabled to maintain a position of independence and supremacy. We are informed that among the Fijians the birth of a child is cause for a perfect jubilee; that parental and filial affection is among the manifest virtues of this people. After referring to the truthfulness and honesty of the Dyaks of Borneo, Mr. Wallace says that “in several matters of morality they rank above most uncivilized, and even above many civilized, nations. They are temperate in food and drink, and the gross sensuality of the Chinese and Malays is unknown among them.”[79] Although the usual checks to population are absent among the Dyaks—namely, starvation, disease, war, infanticide, and vice,—still the women in the Dyak tribe rarely had more than three or four children. In a village in which there were one hundred and fifty families, in only one of them were there six children, and only six with five children.
In whatever direction we turn, evidences are abundant going to prove that under simpler and more natural conditions, and before corrupted by our later civilization, mankind were governed largely by the instincts developed within the female constitution, and that long after her supremacy over the male was lost, the effects of these purer conditions were manifest in the customs, forms, and usages of the people.
From the evidence at hand it seems more than likely that many of the extant tribes have at some remote period been civilized, and that through some natural catastrophe, the unfavourable conditions of climate and soil, or some other equally disadvantageous cause, they have again sunk to a low plane of existence from which they have been unable to rise. From available facts one is almost led to believe that at a period in the remote past, and while living under purer conditions, a high stage of civilization was reached, a civilization which in many respects was equal if not superior to that of the present. Be this as it may, whenever the environment of a people is such that after having reached a certain stage it is unable to advance, it does not remain stationary, but on the contrary follows a line of retrogression; or, whenever the conditions of a race or tribe are such that the higher faculties which tend towards progress lie dormant, the lower forces which incline toward retrogression and which are peculiarly active in low organisms still continue in operation.
Although the social arrangement of the native Australians seems to be founded on classes based on sex—the earliest form of society—still we find them practising polygamy and monogamy side by side, at the same time securing their wives by capture in exactly the same fashion as did the early Greeks and Romans. It is apparent, therefore, that although this people have not been able to advance in the arts of life, as far as the relations of the sexes are concerned they have taken about the same course as have all the other tribes and races in which the supremacy of the male has been gained. For unknown reasons, during thousands of years, the developing agencies have been quiescent, hence no check to the animal instincts has been interposed; the Australians have therefore departed widely from the conditions which surrounded early human society—conditions under which the maternal instincts developed in the lower orders of life were still sufficiently strong to guard the constructive processes and to continue the chain of uninterrupted progress.
As among the lowest existing tribes—peoples which during countless ages have been unable to advance—only the ruder elements in the human composition have been developed, it is plain that from these tribes little if any information concerning an earlier or more natural age, when the animal instincts were controlled by the higher characters developed in human nature, may be obtained; but from those peoples within the several successive stages of development whose environment has been such as to admit of some degree of improvement in the arts of life, and in whom therefore the higher characters developed in their mute progenitors have not been in a state of retrogression, may be obtained a clue to many of the processes by which our present social fabric has been raised. Among such peoples will be retained certain symbols, habits, and traditions representing former modes of life, from which may be reconstructed much of the previous history of the race. For instance, by means of the symbol of wife-capture, a form of marriage which is universal among tribes in a certain stage of development, has been furnished much trustworthy information relative to the institution of marriage and the development of the modern family. It matters not that the origin of these symbols is so remote that their true significance is lost by the peoples who practise them, they nevertheless repeat with unerring fidelity the past experiences of the race and reveal the origin of later institutions.
As the various tribes and races of mankind have probably sprung from a common progenitor, and as the “nerve cells in the brain of all classes and orders have had the same origin,” their development, although not identical as to time and manner of detail, has been similar in outline and in general results; so it is thought that a correct knowledge of the development of any tribe or race from savagery to civilization must necessarily involve the general history of all the tribes and races of mankind.
[CHAPTER III]
THE GENS—WOMEN UNDER GENTILE INSTITUTIONS
The earliest form of organized society was that into classes founded on the basis of sex,[80] under which the right of individuals to intermarry was restricted to one-fourth of the group. This division of the early race, and the regulations prohibiting conjugal relations with three-fourths the members of the related community, is thought to represent the first coercive abridgment or formal restriction of the then existing conjugal rights, and was inaugurated for the purpose of averting the evil effects arising from intercourse between near relations. Of this early form of society, however, and of the ages during which no organized form existed, little may be known except that which is suggested by the instincts and habits of the highest animals, and that which may be inferred from an investigation of the next higher organization, that into gentes on the basis of kin. Although untold ages intervened between the ancient division of society into classes founded on the basis of sex, and the higher and more important organization into gentes on the basis of kin, this last-named plan for the further development of mankind became universal at a comparatively early stage of human history.