It seems indeed certain that wherever the rule of exogamy exists it may be analysed into a prohibition to marry within the divisions of a larger group; that larger group being consciously recognised as uniting the divergent families by resemblance of dialect, common political ties, or a traditional common descent. The Kalmucks, for instance, call themselves ‘the peculiar people,’ or ‘the four allies,’ and any danger of their national dissolution is obviously diminished by the very fact of the exogamy of their four clans. The Circassians, whose constituent brotherhoods are exogamous, by the occasional assemblies of the brotherhoods for the settlement of disputes, show a consciousness of their political unity, which by the exogamy of the brotherhoods they help to maintain. The Hindu castes preserve their mutual exclusiveness by the very fact of compelling all their constituent families to intermingle in marriage, and so preventing any one of them from dissolving the common relationship by absolute separation or independent growth. So that exogamy rather sustains than prevents a system of marriages within the same stock, and is a mark of a higher conception of social organisation, when people have learned to classify themselves with respect to their neighbours, when tribal and personal property is well established, and when, consequently, marriages between the groups can be effected by purchase better than by violence. Exogamy therefore as the product or concomitant of a somewhat advanced state of thought, not of utter barbarism, would never make marriages by capture a necessity of existence; but, if it did, it would argue so much culture in a tribe capable of maintaining such rules, as would equally justify us in ascribing to them moral feelings, not less advanced and refined than those involved in their adherence to so restrictive a political system.
South Australia supplies a typical illustration of the confusion relating to intertribal marriages which arises from the vague use of the word tribe. For wherever there is reason to suspect that the word clan or family should stand for the word tribe, it is probable that the exogamy predicated of the tribe only prevails between its constituent elements; in other words, that it is only, as among the Kalmucks, Circassians, or Hindu castes, an extended form of the principle of endogamy. Thus, Collins, describing wife-capture in New South Wales, says that ‘it is believed’ the women so taken are always selected from women of a different tribe from that of the males, and from one with whom they are at enmity; that as wives ‘they are incorporated into the tribes to which their husbands belong, and but seldom quit them for others.’ But he uses the word tribe as convertible with the word family, as when he speaks of the natives near Port Jackson being distributed into families, each under the government of its own head, and deriving its name from its place of residence.[344] And the statements of Captain Hunter, a previous writer, that the natives are associated ‘in tribes of many families together,’ living apparently without a fixed residence; that ‘the tribe takes its name, from the place of their general residence;’ and that, the different families wander in different directions for food, but unite on occasion of disputes with another tribe, make it still more probable that when Collins spoke of different tribes he meant merely, different families, or groups, which with all their separate wanderings united sometimes in cases of common danger. So when Captain Hunter himself says that ‘there is some reason to suppose that most of their wives are taken by force from the tribes with whom they are at variance, as the females bear no proportion to the males,’ we may take it that by tribes he means families, and families who recognise their community of blood when a really different tribe provokes their hostility by assembling as a tribe themselves.[345] Mr. Stanbridge, who spent eighteen years in the wilds of Victoria, corroborates this view; for, according to him, each tribe has its own boundaries, the land of which is parcelled out amongst families and carefully transmitted by direct descent; these boundaries being so sacredly maintained that the member of no one family will venture on the lands of a neighbouring one without invitation. The several families (or tribes) unite for mutual purposes under a chief. The women often, but not always, marry into distant tribes; they are generally betrothed in their infancy, but if they grow up unbetrothed the father’s consent must be solicited; failing him, the brother’s; then the uncle’s; and last of all that of a council or a chief of a tribe.[346] That force was ever the normal method by which marriages were effected in Australia, there is no proof; that, on the contrary, mutual likings often set the law, is proved by the story of the native captive girl, who, after living among the colonists for some time, expressed a desire to go away and be married to a young native of her acquaintance; albeit that she left him after three days, returning sadly beaten and jealous of the other wife.[347]
Quite distinct, again, either from the real or pretended reluctance of a savage girl to become a bride, or from the custom of forcing an avaricious parent to a settlement by the shorter process of taking first and paying afterwards, is the custom of stealing women from the same or a neighbouring clan, a custom which prevailed widely in Ireland and Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which in the latter country has been ‘glorified in a whole literature of songs and ballads.’[348]
That polygamy and wife-purchase and artificial tribal regulations often lead to such a result cannot be denied; but that it is anywhere a system, sustained by prejudices, whencesoever derived, seems completely unwarranted by the evidence hitherto collected. The Coinmen of Patagonia, who made annual inroads on the Tekeenica tribe, killing the men and carrying off not only the women but the children, dogs, arrows, spears, and canoes, seem to have been actuated rather by the ordinary motives of freebooters (by such motives, for instance, as induced our early convict settlers in Tasmania to set off with their bullock-chains to make captives of the native women[349]) than by any scruples of marrying relations at home. Carib wives taken in war were accounted slaves; and so far were the Caribs from being dependent on aggression for their wives, that before their customs were modified by acquaintance with the Christians their only legitimate wives were their cousins.[350] If a man had no cousin to marry, or put off doing so till it was too late, he might then marry some non-relative, with the consent of her parents. At the festival that followed a successful war the parents vied with one another in offering their daughters as wives to those who were praised by their captains as having fought with bravery. The Caribs of the continent differed from those of the islands in that men and women spoke the same language, not having corrupted their native tongue by marriages with foreign women.[351] According to Humboldt, the language of the Caribs of the continent was the same, from the source of the Rio Branco to the steppes of Cumana; and the pride of race which led them to withdraw from every other people, and was the cause of the failure of all missionary efforts that tried to combine them with villages containing people of another nation and speaking another idiom, would surely have militated against making exogamy a preliminary condition of matrimony.[352] Humboldt, indeed, says that polygamy was more extensively practised by the Caribs and other nations that ‘preserved the custom of carrying off young girls from the neighbouring tribe;’ but it would be contrary to all previous accounts of the people to suppose these were their only wives, such a supplement to domestic felicity being everywhere the common reward, though seldom the chief object, of successful war. The curious difference in the language of the men and of the women found to exist among the Caribs of the West Indian Archipelago, and attributed by tradition to the conquest of a former people on the islands, whose wives the conquerors appropriated, has perhaps been rather exaggerated, for in a list of 488 words and phrases employed by both sexes, in only 36 is there any difference marked between the language of the men and that of the women. The origin of the difference may be doubted, as there were also words and phrases used by the old men of the people which the younger ones might not use; and there was a war-dialect of which neither women, girls, or boys had any knowledge.[353] But probably the difference arose from a custom similar to that of the Zulus, which makes it unlawful for a woman to use any word containing the sound of her father-in-law’s name or of the names of her husband’s male relations. ‘Whenever the emphatic syllable of either of their proper names occurs in any other word, she must avoid it, by either substituting an entirely new word, or at least another syllable in its place. Hence this custom has given rise to an almost distinct language among the women.’[354] In consequence of this Hlonipa custom, according to another witness, ‘the language at this present time almost presents the phenomenon of a double one.’[355] That the Caribs maintained the common etiquette of reserve between parents and children-in-law,[356] makes it not improbable that the reserve extended itself to their language, and thus produced the same phenomenon that we find in South Africa.
In the same way other cases of wife-capture appear simply in the light of savage lawlessness, which may have been more common among quite primitive tribes than it is in their nearest modern representatives; but which, if it ever was widely prevalent, is most unlikely to have been perpetuated in symbol, by a form of capture. If then the form is easily explicable on other grounds, such as have been suggested, we have a reason the less for supposing in the past a state of things which would exclude from the relations between male and female the happy influence of that mutual affection which has been shown not to have been entirely absent even among, perhaps, the rudest of our species, the aborigines of Australia or the Veddahs of Ceylon, and which is certainly disseminated more or less widely, outside the human race, through a large part of the animal creation.
It is probably impossible to resuscitate in imagination a picture of primitive times. It is with the lower societies of the world as with the lower animal organisms: the more they are studied, the more wonderful is the complexity of structure they unfold. Tribal and subtribal divisions of communities, tribal and subtribal divisions of territory, strong distinctions of rank, stringent rules of etiquette, are found on all sides to characterise populations in other circumstances of life scarcely less rude than the brute creation around them. The first beginnings of social evolution are lost, nor can they be observed in any known races that appear to have advanced the least distance from the starting-point of progress. But, as there is no reason to suppose that the external conditions of primitive man were ever very different from those of existing tribes; that those, for instance, of the shell-mound builders or the cave-dwellers differed widely from those of existing Ahts or Bushmen, so there is nothing unreasonable in believing, that the earliest human denizens of the globe were endowed with the same rudiments of feelings that prevail among them, and that these should, even in very early times, have produced very similar social institutions. That Greeks and Egyptians, Chinese and Hindus, had legends ascribing marriage to the invention of a particular legislator, thereby implying there was a time when marriage was not, no more proves that there was ever a time when some sort of marriage was unrecognised than the many legends of the origin of fire prove that mankind were ever destitute of the blessing of its warmth. A minimum of reflection on the subject would produce the legend, just as reflections on the world’s origin have produced countless legends of its creation, of a time when it too was nonexistent. And it will be found, wherever any known savage tribe really practises no wedding customs, that the fact of the marriage is distinctly recognised, either by payment in kind or labour by the bridegroom or by some symbolical act notifying the union to all fellow-tribesmen. The Veddahs, for instance, according to Tennant, used no marriage rites; but another writer mentions, that on the day of marriage the husband received from his bride a cord twisted by herself, which he had to wear round his waist till his death, as a symbol of the lastingness of the union between them. The Kherias of India, who have no word for marriage in their language, give public recognition to the fact by certain rites and festivities, closely analogous to those in vogue in neighbouring tribes. The Coroadas of Brazil have no marriage solemnity, but the suitor presents the bride’s parents with fruit or game, as a tacit engagement to support her by the chase. Such a tacit expression of willingness and ability to take good care of his wife is a common symbolical act among savages, even the rudest; whilst the fact that for the married pair henceforth there will be a union of life and fortune is indicated by many a wedding custom, of no doubtful meaning, as by the eating of a cake together, or by the Dyak custom of making the married couple sit together on two bars of iron, ‘to intimate the wish of the bystanders that blessings as lasting and health as vigorous as that metal may attend the pair.’
But symbolical acts like these—and they might be multiplied indefinitely—presuppose an advanced state of thought and feeling, behind which we cannot get in the observation of any existing savage tribes; and since they are common wherever the pretence of capture is common, that pretence may well be symbolical too; but symbolical, not of an earlier system of marriage, but of a conventional regard for good manners. Wherever the pretence of capture exists, it exists amid conditions of life so far removed from what might naturally be conceived as the most archaic, that it is quite legitimate to attribute the decorous reluctance of the bride and the resistance of her relations at weddings to such feelings as have been proved to prevail upon such occasions, and so to consider the bride’s behaviour as something quite unconnected with the lawless practice of wife-abduction, a practice which undoubtedly prevails to a certain extent in the savage world (chiefly in consequence of artificial social arrangements), which may have prevailed to a still greater extent when men lived in the caves of Périgord or upon former continents, but which it is incredible should ever have survived by transmission as a symbol, as a custom worthy of religious preservation.