It is very easy to exaggerate the bright as well as the dark features of primitive social life. The reports of travelers, often untrained in the interpretation of the facts which they observe, are notoriously untrustworthy. It is extremely difficult to discern the motives which actuate men in a stage of culture remote from our own. Nevertheless it seems certain that the position of uncivilized woman with respect to marriage is not quite so hopeless as is generally imagined. The facts appear to demonstrate that woman's original liberty of selection has never been entirely lost. It is evident that wife-purchase, though sometimes the means of degradation, even of marital bondage, is compatible with a high degree of matrimonial choice. The ideas which influence the "uncivilized" man in selling his daughter are probably often very similar to those which govern the thrifty father in modern society when he insists on securing a good "match" for his child. The price is regarded as a fair equivalent for the services to which the parent is justly entitled in return for rearing the girl.[704] The Kafir maiden who brings a good price from her suitor is not therefore necessarily a "chattel" any more than is the daughter whose labor the civilized parent lets out for hire.[705] A high price may be looked upon also as a proper recognition of the rank or of the mental and physical attractions of the bride.[706] Furthermore, it is significant that actual bride-purchase may coexist with advanced ethical and religious conceptions of the marriage state. Such, according to Kohler, is the case in the Punjab, where the courts under British rule have decided that the sale of a woman to be a wife is not punishable as a crime under the statute forbidding the sale of a human being into slavery;[707] and Leist has shown that in the dharma period of early Aryan history the purchased wife was not regarded as a "thing," but in the fullest sense as a free wife entitled to share the sacra of the husband's house. Nay, the actual payment of the legal bride-money in certain cases was the only means through which marriage by purchase could reach the proper ethical end of legitimate marriage: the birth of a son to perpetuate the ancestral worship.[708]
Another fact, sometimes misinterpreted, seems to point clearly to the persistence of original free marriage. It is highly significant that wife-purchase appears never to have existed at all among a certain number of very low races, with which nevertheless marriage rests on the free consent of the parties. Such is the case among the California Wintun, the Alaskan Yukonikhotana, the Andamanese, the Chittagong hill tribes, and certain African peoples. Among the "Pádams, one of the lowest peoples of India, it is customary for a lover to show his inclinations whilst courting by presenting his sweetheart and her parents with small delicacies, such as field mice and squirrels, though the parents seldom interfere with the young couple's designs, and it would be regarded as an indelible disgrace to barter a child's happiness for money."[709] So likewise with the Veddahs[710] either no presents are given on either side, or else the ceremony consists simply in offering some food to the parents of the bride; and elsewhere the proffer of similar "wooing-gifts," without previous stipulation, must be looked upon either as a token of good-will or as an indication of the ability of the bridegroom to provide for a wife, rather than as a means of purchase.[711] The probational marriages of the Seri Indians appear to have a like significance.[712] May we not go a step farther? Is it not probable that the widely diffused custom of bestowing presents of greater value, even where the amount is established by usage or previous agreement, may sometimes be due to like motives? Though, as a rule, the presentation of such gifts represents a "weakened" form of wife-purchase, it does not seem necessary to assign the origin of the practice to a single cause. The same is true of the custom of exchanging presents between the two families. Usually it is rightly explained as a stage in the decay of purchase and in the rise of the dower; but when we find the return of gifts in use among such rude peoples, for instance, as the Bechuanas, the Kalmucks, the Makassars, and the American Indians,[713] it seems reasonable to suppose that the custom, in some cases at least, may represent a ceremonial development of free marriage, taking its rise in various motives. Thus among the Todas, it has been suggested, the transaction appears as an exchange of dowers to serve as a security for the mutual good behavior of the future couple.[714] Similarly with the American Indians the gift to the bride's parents may sometimes be designed to purchase clan privileges[715] or to procure the "alliance of the wife's cabin;" while the exchange of presents, which is found where it is usual for the husband to take up his abode in the wife's home, ought perhaps to be regarded as a matrimonial compact of alliance between the two families.[716]
Nevertheless, after every allowance is made, the custom of purchasing wives bears the indelible stamp of barbarism. Like polygyny, which it so often accompanies, it is an offense against the feelings and the dignity of woman. Therefore, often at a relatively early period of social progress, it falls into disrepute; but while it is gradually abandoned as a thing unseemly or disgraceful, traces of it may long survive. On the one hand, as in the case of the Roman coemptio, the Hindu ārsha, the Anglo-Saxon beweddung, or the Jewish contract with the penny, the form of sale is present in the wedding ceremony; or, on the other hand, the bride-money, though still rendered, comes in time to be regarded as simply a compensation for the guardianship of the woman;[717] or else, passing through several intermediate stages, it is slowly transformed into a dower.[718]
In the first stage of decline the bride-price appears as a nominal compensation, out of proportion to the real value of the girl. It usually consists of presents to the wife's parents or relatives, and sometimes these are scarcely distinguishable from the "wooing-gifts" already mentioned; while later it may degenerate into a mere symbol or become a sportive social observance whose meaning is entirely forgotten.[719] Again, among a large number of peoples, custom requires that a part, sometimes all, of the gifts constituting the price, or their equivalent, shall be returned to the bridegroom or his family; and it is significant that special care is sometimes taken, as among the Indians of Oregon, "not to turn over the same horses or the same articles."[720] With other peoples a part or the whole of the purchase price comes to the bride herself. Either the father turns it over as a marriage portion, or it is paid to her directly by the bridegroom. In the latter case, as Westermarck observes, it is often difficult "to make out whether the presents obtained from the bridegroom formed originally a part of the bride-price or were only a means of gaining her own consent."[721] One step more, and we reach the stage of development in which the father provides his daughters with a dotal portion out of his own substance.[722]
Thus, to summarize, it appears in general that the institution of dower takes its rise in two principal sources: either it is derived through the return gift from its exact opposite, the ancient purchase price of the bride; or, as a means of providing in some way for the wife as a member of the new household, it has developed along with free marriage, and stands as an expression of the natural motives and desires upon which the human family rests. Strangely enough, in our own society the marriage portion "has become a purchase sum by means of which a father buys a husband for his daughter."[723] It may be doubted whether the ideas which actuate the modern plutocrat in such a transaction differ essentially from those of the rich savage or barbarian who succeeds in procuring a beautiful or high-born maiden in exchange for his flocks.
We have now traced the evolution of the marriage contract throughout its entire course, and are able to perceive in a measure its true place in the general history of the human family. Again the movement has been in a circle. As in the case of monogamy, the genesis of contract must be sought beyond the border-line between man and the lower animals. In the "natural history" stage of human existence marriage rested on the free consent of the man and the woman. It was an informal agreement. The man was the wooer, and to the woman belonged the first place in sexual choice. In obedience to the unvarying requirements of organic law, the best attributes of each race have thus been differentiated: through natural selection they represent the survival of the fittest. At a later stage of development the element of mutual consent falls somewhat into abeyance. With the rise of property, industry, and a more complex social organization, giving birth to new desires and ambitions, contract by the guardian in part supersedes self-betrothal. Purchase and its occasional alternative, capture, depriving woman of her natural right of assent, tend to reduce the wife to concubinage and domestic slavery. But fortunately the victory is not complete. Just as monogamy is never displaced by polygyny as the natural type of marriage, so the consent of woman as the normal condition of matrimonial union is never entirely destroyed by wife-purchase. With the evolution of altruism, the increase of culture, producing sympathy upon which connubial love largely depends, and the gradual recognition of the spiritual equality of the sexes, self-betrothal, like monogamy, again predominates. In short, whether regarded historically or biologically, monogamy and self-betrothal appear simply as two aspects of the same institution; they are connected by a psychic bond, and together they constitute the highest type of marriage and the family.