Wm'^ V- Y ' V MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY Marriage and Heredity B IDiew of Ipei^cbological lEvolution BY J. F. NISBET THIRD EDITION LONDON WARD AND DOWNEY 1903 PKEFACE It is hardly the Author's fault if this book appears to lay claim to being the Manual of a new Social Science. His primary object was to present in a compact form what history, philosophy, science, and even poetry and fiction have to teach on the subjecc of marriage. From the collation of the facts disclosed in many independent lines of inquiry certain leading principles are evolved which may be found to be worthy of attention. Hitherto the physical aspect of evolution has almost exclusively engrossed the attention of scientific men, and the important fact remains unexplained that while there is practically no difference in bodily form and structure between savage and civilised man, the numerous races of mankind exliibit much variety of mental capacity, and are consequently more or less fitted to carry on the struggle for existence. Physically, the savage is sometimes superior to the European, having greater VI PREFACE muscular strength and greater powers of endurance. Yet the superior mental capacity of the European secures him an easy victory over the savage in what- ever field he happens to be opposed to him. The European is the master of the world. By what means has he attained his superiority ? Not by physical selection, for not only are the Englishman, the Eed Indian, and the Zulu similar in point of physique, but even the evidence of the Egyptian tombs does not warrant us in supposing that within any measurable period of time man was ever physi- cally less developed than now. These considerations prompted Wallace some years ago to put forward the speculative opinion that with the origin of mind in the human race selection with regard to physical form and structure ceased, man as an animal remain- ing stationary, because all changes in his environment were met by mental instead of corporeal adaptation — that is to say, he made clothes instead of growing fur to suit a particular climate, he learnt to cope with the strength and the agility of other animals by in- venting weapons, when food was scarce he produced it artificially, and so on. The results of an inquiry into the operation of marriage and heredity from the earliest times and PREFACE vii all over the world seem to bear out Wallace's specu- lation, and to prove that although physically man now remains unchanged, mentally his development continues. In other words, it would seem that the evolution of the human race has passed from the physiological into the psychological field, and that it is in the latter alone henceforward that progress may be looked for. This fact is especially interest- ing at a time when the biological theories of Weismann seem to set great limitations upon the variability of species. Whatever may be the case with the bodily characteristics of man, his psycho- logical condition would appear to be highly sus- ceptible to the influence of his surroundings, and what we know of the law of heredity justifies the belief that a mental state comprising an elaborate set of social sentiments is more or less transmissible. The child of civilised parents does not come into the world with the same mental equipment as the little savage. He is not obliged to work out all social problems de novo. His mind has an hereditary bent which enables him easily and naturally to fulfil his duties as a citizen. No doubt it is difficult to deter- mine what features in the character of an individual are due to education and what to heredity. Until viii PREFACE an English child is taken from his mother's breast, and brought up without any intercourse with his kind, we shall never know precisely in what respect he differs at birth, morally, from a little Hottentot. But the presumption in favour of the heredity of sentiment is overwhelmingly great, even in the case of sentiment which has been accumulated within a fewer number of generations than Weismann assigns to the continuity of his Keimplasma. As regards the method in which the question of psychological evolution is treated in the following pages, objection may be taken to the frequent allusions made to works of fiction. No doubt the evidence furnished from this source as to prevailing currents of sentiment at a given period is inexact and un- scientific. But psychology is as difficult to discuss as questions of taste, and an inquirer into the history of popular sentiment, be he as painstaking as he may, can only hope to arrive approximately at the truth. The drama is perhaps after all a more faithful reflex of the popular sentiment of a period than the pages of history; for while the historian may interpret events in the light of preconceptions and prejudices of his own, the dramatist is bound to study and to conform to the feelings of an audience of his contemporaries. The V PREFACE be subject of the elective affinities is closely allied to that of sexual selection. By more than one authority it is questioned whether the importance of sexual selection was not overrated by Darwin ; and there is in fact great difficulty in explaining upon the score of utility alone such variations of structure as the peacock's tail, while in all species, including man, the inferior types find partners without difficulty, and are, upon the whole, as productive as the superior ones. It would thus appear that sexual selection is swallowed up in natural selection. At the same time, men may be trusted to reason about their own feel- ings more accurately than they can about those of any other species, and the existence of sexual pre- ferences in the human race will hardly be denied. In connexion with a theory of psychological evolu- tion, the elective affinities which are a form of mental selection acquire a new and scientific importance. London, July 1889. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE What is Marriage ? . . . . .1 CHAPTER n The Growth op the Tie . . .-^ .14 CHAPTER III Christian Marriage and Morality . . .35 CHAPTER IV Chivalry and Platonic Love . . .58 CHAPTER V The Law of Heredity . . . .71 CHAPTER VI Transmission of Physical and Mental Charac- teristics . . . . . .88 Xli CONTENTS CHAPTER VII PAGE Throwing Back axd the Metamorphoses op Heredity . . . . .105 CHAPTER VIII Eelative Influence of the Male and Female Parent . . . . . .118 CHAPTER IX Consanguinity . . . • .130 CHAPTER X Blue Blood . . . . • .137 CHAPTER XI The Procreation of Genius . . . .148 CHAPTER XII Beauty and the Elective Affinities , .161 CHAPTER XIII Polygamy . . . . • .186 CHAPTER XIV The Family Insmncts .... 203 CHAPTER XV The Future of Society . . . .212 MAKRIAGE AND HEREDITY CHAPTER I WHAT IS MAKRIAGE? It may be said generally of marriage that although associated in Christian countries with a religious ceremony, it is subject to the same process of develop- ment as any other social or political institution, and is to be judged by the same standards, namely, those of usefulness and expediency. No fixed laws of morality or virtue are to be found in human nature. The Darwinian theory that all animal instinct is governed by physical conditions may not be so confidently accepted at the present day as it was a few years ago, but there is nevertheless strong evidence that many of the mental states of a given people — moods or dispositions loosely called instinctive — are induced B 2 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY by circumstances and then fixed by heredity. Be- cause such psychological developments are unac- companied by any physical changes of structure in man, it would be rash to conclude against the possibility of their occurring. So staunch a Darwinian as Wallace has assumed that the mental adaptability of man will henceforward enable him to meet all changes in his surroundings without the aid of physical selection ; ^ and the theory of a psychological process of evolution superposed upon the physical has certainly much to recommend it. Such sentiments as the detestation of marriages between brother and sister, esteem for chastity, and the modern respect and deference shown to woman as the "weaker vessel," are all sufficiently deep- rooted in the Englishman's nature to be called in- ^ " From the time when the social and sympathetic feelings came into active operation, man would cease to be influenced by selection in his physical form and structure. As an animal he would remain almost stationary, the changes in the surrounding universe ceasing to produce in him that powerful individual effect which they exer- cise over other parts of the organic world. But from the moment that the form of his body became stationary, his mind would be- come subject to those very influences from which his body had escaped. Every slight variation in his mental and moral nature which would enable him the better to stand against adverse cir- cumstances would be preserved and accumulated." — Paper, "The Action of Natural Selection on Man," by A. R. Wallace, WHAT IS MARRIAGE 1 8 stinctive; but they are none of them to be found among primitive races, where the status of women is extremely low. They are the outcome of social and religious influences falling within the range of history. It is certain that the important group of senti- ments comprised under the term chivalry or platonic gallantry, for example, was but little known to the Greeks and Romans, and that it has in the main been developed under the influence of the purity doctrines of the Christian Church. By those doctrines, preached for so many centuries, our moral nature has been profoundly influenced. The modern European has the chivalrous instinct bred in the marrow of his bones, so much so that there are probably few roughs in Christendom so abandoned as not to make way for a lady on occasion — a mark of politeness unfamiliar alike to the noble savage and the polished Oriental ; and the growth of this feeling has had the immensely important result of giving women a voice in the dis- posal of their affections. If the establishment of monogamous marriage did much for the welfare of womankind, that curiously complex sentiment of comparatively modern growth which demands that a man shall woo his wife and neither buy nor capture her has done still more. 4 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY That habits of mind, induced by circumstances and fixed by heredity, are the true basis of morals, may be proved by a simple reference to facts. As the circumstances of one race differ from those of another, so do the prevailing standards of right and wrong vary all over the world. The morality of the East is not that of the West ; and even neighbouring countries like France and England set up different standards of propriety. Nor is it merely a superficial set of sentiments that are affected in this manner, but some of the most deep-seated of our nature. Let us take, for example, the sense of shame. A Mahomedan woman who cannot be persuaded to unveil her face in the presence of men will think little of displaying the whole of her leg or bosom. Eespect for property is always deeply engrained in a people who have been strictly policed for centuries ; their honesty becomes innate. Subject races habitually resort to methods of warfare that would be repugnant to their con- querors. Lying is a despicable vice in England, but among the Bengalese little or no discredit attaches to it. To return to marriage, there is not a single senti- ment of the modern European bearing upon the rela- tions of the sexes that has not been or is not habitu- WHAT IS MARRIAGE 1 5 ally violated by some section of the human family. Among the ancient Egyptians brothers and sisters were allowed to marry. The ancient Persians saw no harm in a son marrying his mother. In Babylon women were expected to sacrifice their virtue in the temples previous to marriage, and a modified form of this custom has been found in the Balearic Islands, where, on the occasion of a wedding, the bride used to belong for one night to all the guests. On the west coast of Africa a son generally inherits his father's wives, with the exception of his mother. The Krooman, however, goes further ; he inherits his mother with the rest. The practice of husbands lend- ing their wives to guests and friends exists among the aborigines of North and South America, also in Greenland, Siberia, Central Asia, Africa, Australia, and Polynesia. It was not unknown in Eome. Cato lent his wife Martia to his friend Hortensius, and upon the death of the latter took her back to his household. Certain New Zealand tribes meet at intervals and exchange wives. Polyandry, or the custom of one woman having several husbands, exists in Thibet, Ceylon, New Zealand, and Polynesia. In Thibet the several hus- bands of a woman are usually brothers. In such 6 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY promiscuous relationships jealousy, in the European sense of the word, appears to be unknown. Hep- worth Dixon found it among the Mormon wives in Salt Lake City, but those unhappy women were all of English or European birth, and were therefore influenced by European training. A traveller who visited Thibet in the last century, and who found, to his surprise, that the natives "clubbed together in matrimony as in trade," says disputes occasionally arose as to which husband was the father of a par- ticular child, but were settled by a judgment of the mother or by a comparison of the child's features with those of its supposed parent. Dr. Livingstone states that the women of an African tribe, on hearing that a man in England could only take one wife, declared that they would not live in such a country. The inmates of Mahomedan harems live together tranquilly, and think it a sign of neglect on the part of their husbands if they are not jealously guarded. Another set of customs wholly at variance with European notions relates to what may be called marriage on approval. Balzac observes "that the idea of taking a wife on trial will make more wise men reflect than fools laugh." He was not aware WHAT IS MARRIAGE? 7 that experimental marriage lias been very extensively practised. In one of the aboriginal tribes of India marriages take place at a fixed period of the year, when all the candidates, male and female, live together for six days and then pair off. The young Turcoman carries off a girl and lives with her for six weeks, at the end of which time, if she has found favour in his eyes, his friends open negotiations with her parents for a marriage in regular form. In Ceylon marriages are provisional for a fortnight, and are then either annulled or confirmed. In the Andaman Islands marriage lasts only till a child is weaned, when each party seeks a new engagement. The Hussaniyeh Arabs have what Lubbock calls "three-quarters marriage," a woman being expected to be faithful to her husband for three days out of four, but on every fourth day being free to do as she chooses. Among the tribes of Southern India a young woman of sixteen or twenty is married to a boy of five or six, but lives with some other adult male, usually a rela- tive. Her children are fathered upon the boy, but he in turn, when he grows up, has the privilege of begetting children for some other youthful husband. In Japan it is no stain upon a girl's name, or any impediment to her marriage, that she should hire 8 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY herself out for a term of years to the keeper of a house of ill-fame, in order to retrieve her father's fortunes. The Hindu law does not recognise im- potency as a bar to marriage. The wife of a Hindu eunuch is allowed to have a son and heir by a male friend of the husband's duly appointed to represent him. Marriage by capture has been general all over the world, and traces of it survive among ourselves in the throwing of the slipper, originally no doubt a de- fensive action, and in the providing of a " best man," who was, of course, the bridegroom's stoutest supporter in his attempt to carry off the bride from her pro- tectors. In its early form the capture is real, violence and stratagem being used by the bridegroom. Thus, among the Australian blacks, a would-be husband awaits his opportunity to pounce upon the unsus- pecting object of his attentions. Then with a blow of his club he stuns her, and carries her off senseless to his tent. Or several men combine to capture wives from a neighbouring tribe. Stealthily approach- ing the camp by night, they twist their spears in the hair of the women sleeping by the fires, and under threat of instant death if they give the alarm, com- pel them to follow them. In Fiji the seizure of WHAT IS MARRIAGE t 9 women in war is conjoined with cannibalism, the female captives being turned into wives and the men into food. Among the early Greeks and Romans wives were captured, and a similar practice obtained among the Jews. It is only among the lowest races that actual violence in the capture of wives is now resorted to. From being real the process of capture has become feigned, and in this secondary form may be found in all quarters of the globe. The practice exists in a transition state among the Bedouins. After a mar- riage has been agreed upon, the bride offers a real resistance to the bridegroom. The more difficult she is to capture, the more she is applauded. Sometimes she escapes into the mountains and has to be hunted for for days, being secretly supplied with food by her relatives. Darwin finds in the practice of feigned capture examples of the process of sexual selection on the part of women as well as men, the women only allowing themselves to be taken when their pursuers are to their liking. Among the Calmucks a girl sought in marriage is mounted upon a horse and rides off at full speed, her lover pursuing, and whether she is caught or not depends entirely upon the state of her feelings. A similar practice is seen in Pata- 10 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY gonia, the Malay Archipelago, and in North-eastern Asia. The girl in these cases is not put upon horse- back, but hides or runs, or otherwise asserts her free- dom of choice in the matter of a husband. Among the blacks of New Zealand the husband has to remove his bride by force. If she dislikes him, the task is a tremendous one ; it is the work of hours dragging her a hundred yards. But if she has a partiality for her captor, her resistance is easily overcome. The feigned capture of brides existed in Wales until the last cen- tury, the bridegroom's friends and the bride's engaging in a mock scuffle. This ceremony is witnessed also among tribes inhabiting the plains of India.^ The process of transition from the primitive forms of marriage to that practised by Christian communities is a very slow and gradual one. Its earlier stages we can only guess. We may suppose that in tribes living promiscuously men would prefer certain women to others, and would try to hold them against aU ^ The foregoing and other singular maniage customs are described in MacLennan's Primitive Marriage; Sir J. Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation; Huth's Marriage of Near Kin ; Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians ; Banerjee's Hindu Law of Marriage ; Hepworth Dixon'a New America; Lane's Modern EgyjJtians; Darwin's Descent of Man ; and Karnes's History of Man. Gibbon and Herodotus also furnish examples. WHAT IS MARRIAGE 1 11 comers. A sense of ownership in wives, as in cattle, weapons, or other goods, would thus arise, and it would become necessary to stamp them with the seal of possession. Hence the adoption of a marriage cere- mony of some sort, however rude. Purchase probably followed upon capture. Lubbock has invented the term " communal marriage " to express the order of things under which a woman is supposed to belong to her tribe and not to any individual, but the dis- tinction between this and promiscuous intercourse is rather fanciful. The idea of communal rights may help to explain the Babylonish and Balearic customs above referred to. It may also have been at the bottom of a strange Peruvian notion that a husband was disgraced if his wife on her marriage day proved to be a virgin. MacLennan opines that marriage by capture in the form of exogamy, or the practice of one tribe raiding another and carrying off its women, was due to a scarcity of females. But later writers disagree with him upon this point. Lubbock believes that the system of capture was originally adopted by chiefs and others as a means of obtaining exclusive possession of a wife — as a form of marriage, in fact, which did not interfere with communal rights. Herbert Spencer thinks that the possession of foreign wives 12 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY would be regarded as a mark of prowess in a tribe, and that it would become every warrior's ambition to capture women as a Eed Indian captures scalps. Another inducement to the establishment of a form of marriage is probably the desire of men to know their own particular children. This feeling would grow up with the recognition of property. The pleasures of paternity are unknown to men living under the most primitive conditions. At first cliildren are affiliated not to particular couples, but to the tribe ; their kin- ship through females is recognised, children being sure of their mother although not of their father. In such circumstances we may suppose it is felt as a hardship that men who have accumulated property should not be able to leave it to their sons, and the next step towards the constitution of society, as we know it, is the exclusive appropriation of wives. Some form of marriage is always well established before religion intervenes in the ceremony. Un- questionably, however, religion has profoundly influ- enced the marriage customs of the world, sometimes for good, more often for evil. The establishment of caste in India had the advantage of checking pro- miscuous relationships to begin with, but its unbend- ing rules have since been productive of much abuse WHAT IS MARRIAGE'! 18 and oppression. Polygamy, as sanctioned by all the great religions of the East, is an undoubted evil, sapping the vitality of the races brought under its sway, and unfitting them for the task of holding their own in the world. On the other hand, the influence of Christianity, with its practical equalisation of the sexes, has been healthful and regenerative. Mono- gamy, upon which the progress of the human race so largely depends — we shall see in due time how — was not invented by Christianity, but it gained enormously from the support of Christian doctrine. That marriage is a "divine institution" is true only in the sense in which every institution, whether monarchy or universal suffrage, is divine. Its various forms, as the reader will have gathered, are essentially so many convenient arrangements for the distribution of wives and the rearing of children, and by keeping this fact before us we shall be able to appreciate not only the development it has already undergone, but that of which it is still susceptible — a matter of some importance to mankind. CHAPTEK IT THE GROWTH OF THE TIE In Greece and Rome were sown the seeds of mucli that goes to make up the civilisation of to-day, in letters, art, and law, and in the long stretch of centuries that elapsed from Homer to the Emperor Constantine marriage underwent great changes. The Greeks never fully attained to the modern conception of mutual fidelity on the part of husbands and wives ; they made this enormous advance upon their barbarian neighbours, however, that marriage was intimately bound up with citizenship, and that great store was set upon matronly virtue, which was ensured by the seclusion of wives in pretty much the same fashion as that obtaining at the present day in Eastern countries. Love appears to have had little to do with mar- riage, for the few individual instances of conjugal attachment that have been handed down to us did THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 16 not constitute a rule. Wives were kept for the pro- creation of citizens ; the honoiu'S of society were reserved for the courtesan. In Athens, at its most brilliant period, prostitution was the only career open to an ambitious woman. Marriage was a species of domestic slavery; it was the courtesan who was consulted by the philosopher, and whose beauty inspired the poet and the sculptor. The romantic love that enters so largely into our modern life was consequently unknown in Athens, and is not reflected in any degree in Greek literature. Homer's Penelope, for example, is a stately matron, faithful to her lord throughout his twenty years' absence, but otherwise cold and statuesque. The return of Ulysses is not the signal for any outburst of pent-up affection or tenderness in the household. Penelope is calm and collected, and her duty is fulfilled in extending to her long-lost husband a dignified and submissive welcome. Imagine how a modern poet would treat such an event ! With what emotion, what tears, what embraces, would the long- separated couple throw themselves into each other's arms ! To ^schylus, again, love is a sentiment un- worthy of a poet's attention. He lauds the eternal principle of fecundity ; but his personages neither 16 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY feel nor speak of love as a passion. The same austere views are expressed by Sophocles. Hsemon, it is true, dies upon the tomb of Antigone, but from his previous harangues it would be difficult to gather that he had any affection for that heroine. Indeed, when reproached by his father with being a woman's slave, he repels the suggestion as an insult. How differently Eacine, as a modern poet, makes Achilles speak in defending Iphigenia ! A still more striking proof of the divergence existing between the Greek and the modern view of love is to be found in com- paring the Antigone of Sophocles with the Kabale und Liebe of Schiller. Ferdinand and Luise, like Hsemon and Antigone, die together, but whereas the Greek hero talks politics, the German lover proudly vindicates the claims of passion. "Father," says Ferdinand, "there is a region in my heart where your authority has never penetrated ; do not dare to enter there ! " Then after Luise's death, conducting his father to her body, he exclaims : " Look, bar- barian ! gloat over the results of your tyranny. Death has written your name upon that face, and there it shall be read by the destroying angels. . . . May such a figure as this be by your tomb when you rise again, and on God's right hand when you THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 17 are judged." No ancient addresses language of this kind to his father. In Greek tragedy love is admitted only as a form of relentless fate. It is not allowed to enter into family life in the form of passion, nor is woman's modesty respected as the public sentiment of the moderns requires it to be. Both Euripides and Eacine have treated the story of Andromache, each from the point of view of his own age. The Greek poet depicts the maternal love of his heroine, but cares nothing for her other womanly attributes. From being the spouse of the noble Hector, slain in battle with the Greeks, Andromache becomes the slave of Pyrrhus. But her past rank entitles her to no consideration ; on the contrary, she is made to perform the most menial offices, and as a matter of course shares the bed of her captor. And her fate would seem to have been entirely agreeable not only to Greek notions, but to the spirit of Eomau civilisation as well ; for Virgil, while accepting the views of Euripides, represents Pyrrhus as afterwards marrying Andromache to one of his slaves, Helenus, another Trojan captive, and the brother of Hector. Against such humiliating treatment of a noble woman it never occurred to the Greek or Koman c 18 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY public to enter a word of protest. Eacine had to proceed upon different lines. His Andromache is a prisoner also, but an honoured one. Pyrrhus loves her, but he is discreet and respectful in his attentions, and shrinks from the thought of outraging her sense of delicacy. And to the French Andromache this submissiveness on the part of her conqueror appears perfectly natural. Had Eacine followed his Greek model, and allowed Pyrrhus to exercise the rights of a master over his female slave, he would have raised a storm of indignation among his audience. The unchivalrous character of the Greeks is further exemplified in their treatment of the passion of jealousy. The growth of jealousy among a people is a sign of increasing esteem for the female sex. We do not mean the jealousy which prompts the lower animals to fight for the possession of their females, but that higher sentiment which concerns itself with a woman's honour. Among the lowest races jealousy of this stamp is unknown. There is always some progress made when female virtue is guarded by bolts and bars and veils and a rigorous surveillance, but it is only in the most advanced communities that men are scrupulous about the fidelity of women, and at the same time willing to trust to their sense of duty. THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 19 In the main the confidence which women now claim and receive is not misplaced. Chastity, like benevolence and other virtues, has been much dis- cussed by rival schools of philosophy, the adherents of the Intuitive system believing it to be the out- come of an innate consciousness of right and wrong in the female nature, and the Utilitarians viewing it as a matter of prudential calculation on the part of the individual. Upon such questions the modern theory of evolution, which treats instinct as an in- herited custom, has thrown a flood of light. We now know that the Intuitives and the Utilitarians alike had some grasp of the truth. Chastity has become in- stinctive among women in highly civilised races, and it has done so precisely in the same way as honesty becomes instinctive in a people who have been law- abiding for many generations. Both virtues, which are peculiar to the human race, grow up simultane- ously with the notion of property, chastity being demanded of women as soon as men develop the desire to transmit property to their children. From very ancient times men have been uncom- promising upon the subject of the adultery of their wives, death being often the penalty attached to the crime ; whereas it is quite a modern and academic 20 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY idea that men should be punished for infidelity. And here we may observe that the modern enthusiasts who insist upon men being judged by the same stand- ards of morality as women, especially with reference to breaches of the marriage vow, wholly mistake the fundamental conditions of the problem. That queen of France who threw in her husband's face the scath- ing taunt — "I can produce princes, you nothing but bastards," touched the matter, so to speak, with a needle. The purity of the family is bound up with the chastity of the wife. The husband's infidelity does not necessarily affect his home interests. Had James I. been the son of David Eizzio, Queen Mary's fault would have been infinitely more far- reaching in its effects than the profligacy of any of the Stuart kings. That women can be strongly jealous is true, but their jealousy springs from a different cause from that of men. It is analogous to the instinct of self-preservation. The wife is jealous because she feels the necessity of defending her position ; and her sufferings can be assuaged, to some extent, by the assurance that her rival is inferior to herself in attract- iveness, and has no chance of supplanting her in her husband's affections — a motive which cannot possibly weigh with a jealous husband. Most women are, no THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 21 doubt, prepared to deny that their jealousy has so prosaic a basis as self-interest, and they are so far right that they are not consciously swayed by that motive. The truth is that in both sexes jealousy has long become instinctive, and its true origin is conse- quently obscured or lost sight of. The jealousy of women remains none the less essentially different in its purposes from the jealousy of men. In the one case, the instinct is designed to ensure protection to the woman who is rendered dependent by child-bearing, and in the other its object is to regulate the paternity of children. The husband's infidelity can be repaired and forgiven ; the wife's, on the other hand, as regards its consequences, is irreparable. It is the merest sophistry therefore to argue that the offences of hus- bands and wives ought to be equalised before the law, and so truly is this felt by women that they them- selves are the severest judges of an erring sister, while to an erring husband they are wondrous kind. What we have said of the growth of the instinct of chastity explains the futility of the arguments ad- vanced from time to time to condone the position of fallen women, and to secure their recognition in society as victims rather than sinners. The fallen woman is one who has swerved from a standard of right and 22 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY wrong erected by society for its own protection. So long as this standard exists, the claims of the modern courtesan to consideration will stand upon no higher a level than those of the defaulting cashier. The Greeks attained to that state of social advance- ment in which wives are secluded. They did not, like the Eomans, rise beyond it. They never dis- pensed with the gyngeceum — an institution closely resembling the Mahomedan harem. But we have no right to blame the men of that age for their treat- ment of their womenkind. The gynseceum was an educational stage in the experience of women the benefits of which we now enjoy, and it is very prob- able that if Greek husbands had trusted to the sense of honour of their wives, which was then only begin- ning to be cultivated, they would have leant upon a broken reed.^ In Greek literature jealousy is frankly represented in the initiatory stage that we have endeavoured to ^ Confidence in female virtue was of slow growth. In the four- teenth century French wives were not allowed to receive visits from men except in the presence of tlieir husbands. Anne of Brittany introduced the fashion of ladies appearing publicly at Court. This fashion was afterwards carried into England, but even down to the time of the Revolution English women of rank seldom appeared in the streets without a mask. The modern veil or " fall " is probably a survival of the custom. THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 23 describe. Whether among wives or concubines or courtesans, it is little more than a rivalry of interests. The Andromache of Euripides seutentiously reminds Hector that for his sake she has loved the women that he loved, and even suckled the children they have had by him. Hermione's jealousy of Andromache is inspired less by Pyrrhus's attentions to his distin- guished captive than by the threatened loss of her posi- tion as the head of his household. As much may be said of the jealousy of Dejanira in the Trachinice of Sophocles. It does not manifest itself until she learns that the captive lole is not an ordinary concubine of her husband's, but one respecting whom he has special views. In the comedies of Menander, who flourished late, love and jealousy found fuller expression than in the ancient tragedies, judging by the fragments of his work that remain and the Latin adaptations of his plays by Plautus and Terence. But his stories deal chiefly with the amours of young libertines and courtesans, from which anything like elevated senti- ment is necessarily excluded. The supremacy of the courtesan in Athenian society is easily accounted for. The wife held her position by virtue of the law regulating the pure national extraction of children, and marriages were arranged 24 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY upon the basis of the dowry, the man seldom seeing his bride until the day of the ceremony. Judging by the comedies, which then, as now, we may suppose, reflected the feelings of society with tolerable fidelity, the wife was often a scold and a shrew, apt to presume upon the accession she had brought to the family wealth. In any case, she was condemned to a narrow round of domestic interests, which she shared with her husband's concubines. The courtesan, on the other hand, lived an unrestricted life, and acquired a knowledge of the world that made her an interesting companion. Her house was a literary and fashionable resort. Socrates and Pericles frequented the society of Aspasia. Theodota, another famous courtesan, exercised great political influence, and was instructed by Socrates in the art of enslaving her clients. The decay of the Greek civilisation has long been a standing wonder to the historian and the moralist. We believe that the mystery may to some extent be explained by the rigour of the Athenian marriage law, which produced, in a comparatively small com- munity, a system of in-and-in breeding. With this subject we deal in a subsequent chapter upon " Blue Blood," where the evils of caste are exemplified, par- ticularly in the case of royal families and aristocracies. THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 25 That Athenian society was essentially a caste, and a most exclusive one, is proved by the w^ell- known oration delivered by Demosthenes ^ in the case of the girl Neaera, who, not being of pure Athenian birth, was denied the honours of citizenship. We need only add here that the comparison of Athenian society to a neuropathic family, which, receiving no sufficient infusion of healthy blood, wears itself out in a given number of generations, is supported by the strange fact of the prevalence among the most cultured Greeks, including public men of the highest eminence, of the vice of unnatural love. Upon this subject Lecky and other modern writers have speculated rather wildly, but there is now no doubt that the perversion of the sexual instinct is a disease be- longing to the epileptic group, and denoting a considerable degree of nervous degeneration in the individual.^ In the case of Greece, probably, ^ There is some doubt as to whether Demosthenes was the orator of the occasion, but the point is immaterial to the present argument. The orator speaks of the license accorded to husbands in these terms : "We keep mistresses for our pleasure, concubines for con- stant attendance, and wives to bear us legitimate children, and to be our faithful housekeepers." ^ Cotard, "La Perversion du Sens Genital," Archives de Neuro- logie, 1884. There is a striking passage in Ribot's Hir6dit6 Psychologique with reference to the decadence of the Greeks. " The organic causes of 26 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY the scarcity of free women was responsible in part for the evil, which in that event may still be regarded as Nature's penalty for a vicious law. The Eoman civilisation followed closely the lines of the Greek, the austere manners of the republic giving place to the grossest license under the empire. It is no part of our task to describe the frightful iniquities of Eome in the time of the Csesars — the public orgies of vice and the shameless obscenity of literature. We refer to this subject only to say that from these evils good resulted in a strangely unforeseen manner, and that they were the cause of what may be regarded as an important step in evolution as affecting marriage and the constitution of society. Eoman marriage, like the Greek, began by being a civil obligation, a means of recruiting the population of the state with citizens of pure extraction. Two this event," the writer observes, "the most astonishing in history, may long continue obscure, but in following step by step a degenera- tion which lasted a thousand years, in seeing in their works of art the plastic talent of the Greeks grow stiff and lifeless, their imagi- nation become stunted, and their great men dwindle into medioc- rities, we seem to feel beneath the visible and palpable facts with which alone historians concern themselves, the slow, steady opera- tion of natural causes among these millions of human beings who deteriorated without knowing it, each generation transmitting to its successor in an increasing measure the germs of decay. " THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 27 solemn forms of marriage were practised, Confarreatio and Coemptio, both partaking of the nature of the modern manage de convenance, inasmuch as the in- clinations of the parties were subordinated to consider- ations of duty or expediency. There was no pretence of affection in these unions, which were established upon the basis of the dowry and the maintenance of caste. The Eoman matron, it is true, was treated with more consideration than the Greek. Although to some extent secluded, she was allowed to preside at her husband's table, and was taken to the public festivals. But the results of the system of political marriage were pretty much the same in both communities. In Eome, as in Athens, the husbands of dowered wives — wives qualified as to citizenship, but deficient, it might be, in personal attractions — sought consolation in the society of concubines and courtesans, and with the growth of luxury and of the practice of importing female slaves, the corruption of public morals went on apace. All experience shows the evil influence of the manage de convenance, whether in its ancient or in its modern forms, the case of the Latin races of to-day conveying the same lesson as that of ancient Home. Whenever men are debarred from freely choosing their wives, morality is lax. Seeing how lightly the 28 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY marriage tie is esteemed in Southern Europe, some writers have concluded that a hot climate stimulates the passions ; ^ but it is impossible to maintain such a theory in face of the fact that the Red Indians of North America and the Esquimaux of Greenland, both living in extremely cold latitudes, are as licentious as Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Italians. The drama is a good index to the views of a people upon certain questions of morality. Authors may choose their heroines upon other principles than they choose their wives, but their popularity necessarily depends upon the fidelity with which they reflect the inner senti- ment of the society of their day. In France, where the mariage de convenanee prevails, the stage has never ceased to rail at matrimony, and to exhibit the freer relations of the sexes in a favourable light; whereas in England, where the dowry system is all but unknown, the dramatist has usually regarded marriage with a benevolent eye.^ 1 This fallacy is an old one. It appears to have been first put forward by Montesquieu. Lecky, who has been singularly unfortu- nate in some of his speculations, adopts it in his History of European Morals. 2 Legouve in his Histoire Morale des Femmes exposes the evils of the mariage de convenanee as practised in France. The time of the engagement, he observes, is shortened as much as possible lest the young people should get to know and dislike each other. They are THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 29 In the times of the republic, Roman sentiment had already declared itself against marriage. The dowered wife, with her arrogance and her shrewishness and with her man of business, whose authority is often opposed to that of the husband, is a constant subject of satire in the comedies of Plautus. Sometimes the unhappy husband is represented as scheming with a slave, in order to deceive his wife and procure money wherewith to buy a pretty concubine, while the vixen overhears the plot, together with sundry uncompli- mentary references to her ugliness, her age, and her temper. Sometimes a noble character in the piece pointedly condemns the dowry system. Compared with the wife, the puella or concubine of Plautus and Terence is an estimable character, self-respecting and faithful to her master for the time being, despite the evil counsels of the nieretrix or courtesan, or possibly of a calculating mother. In many cases, no doubt, the lot of the concubine was too shifting to allow of the growth of much tender sentiment either in her own bosom or in that of her successive masters, but there were exceptions to the rule. Terence makes never allowed to see each other alone, and the young man fulfils his duty as a fianc6 in paying a few ceremonious visits to his bride and sending her daily bouquets ordered once for all at the florist's. 30 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY one of his courtesans say to a puella : " Our lovers care only for our beauty ; when that fades their fancy passes to another. But with you it is different. Once you meet with a lover who resembles you in disposi- tion he becomes attached to you, and thenceforward your happiness is assured." This brings us to the great saving clause in the constitution of Eoman society — the growth of a third form of marriage, called Usus, which was a contract without any formal ceremony, or, in other words, marriage by habit and repute. As a species of concu- binage, terminable at the will of either party, Usus seemed Kttle likely to exercise a beneficial influence, and it did certainly produce great instability in the marriage relation. There were women in Eome who could reckon, to their credit or discredit, as many as eight or ten past husbands, and St. Jerome tells us of one being married to a twenty-third husband, who had himself got rid of his twentieth wife. But like that slight variation in the habits of a species which in evolution leads to the most important metamor- phoses, Usus was destined to revolutionise the morals of the world. Latterly it became the general form of marriage in Eome, and whatever its drawbacks may have been, it possessed certain great and incontest- THE GROWTH VP THE TIE 81 able advantages. It implied free choice on the part of the contracting parties, which marriage by family- arrangement did not ; it secured the independence of women, who were allowed to hold property in their own right ; it played a large part in the conversion of the empire to Christianity, through the influence of the female converts, who, under the old patrician systems of Confarreatio and Coemptio, would have been powerless ; and it paved the way for the Christian doctrine of monogamy. To Usus were due those noble examples of conjugal love so conspicuous amid the general corruption of Eoman society — wives who followed their husbands upon distant campaigns, and even refused to survive them, and couples so passion- ately attached to each other that their sarcophagi were adorned with a medallion representing them clasped in each other's arms. Still, the Eomans never fully entered into the sentiment known to the moderns as romantic love — that ineffable captivation of the higher senses which prompted the remark of Proudhon : Chez les dmes d'dite, I'amour n'a pas d'organes. Chastity was reverenced in theory but not in practice. There was a custom that a virgin should not be put to death, but it was deemed to be complied «vith if the 32 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY victim was deprived of her virtue upon the scaffold by the executioner.^ The poets of the Augustan age sing of love, but their passion is certainly not entitled to rank with that of La Nouvelle Helo'ise. Let us glance at the testimony they bear to the morals of the society they lived in. Ovid instructs his mistress Corinna in the art of deceiving her husband, but soon has the mortification of feeling that his lessons are turned to the advantage of a rival or rivals. Quarrels, reproaches, blows, tears, and forgiveness ensue. Then he reflects that he himself is as faithless as Corinna, but infideli- ties on both sides are no bar to a renewal of the lovers' transports. The poet's next grievance is that the lady's husband is not sufficiently jealous. Presently this hardship is remedied, but it soon gives place to another, which is that Corinna does not even take the trouble to disguise her numerous intrigues. And so forth. Corinna is supposed to have been Julia, the daughter of Augustus. The amours of Propertius are not less chequered. He sings the praises of Cynthia, who was a Ptoman lady named Hostia. Faithless himself, Propertius has speedy reason to reproach his mistress with the same failing. She goes off with a soldier ; he weeps and trusts she may be happy. So much * Tliis occurred in the case of the daughter of Sejanus. THE GROWTH OF THE TIE 83 love deserves a recompense. The lady throws over the soldier and returns to the poet. He is delighted, and thanks Apollo and the Muses. But his bliss is of short duration ; he discovers that he has rivals. He forgives Cynthia her infidelities, however, and raves about her beauty, her elegance, and her accom- plishments. Soon he has reason to change his note. Cynthia's amours are the talk of the town. He leaves her, but resumes his chain. It is now her turn to be jealous, and Propertius recognises that he is in truth a sad dog. Once more the tables are turned upon the lover, who seeks consolation in the wine-cup. Another reconciliation is followed by further scenes, and the climax is reached when Cynthia makes the poet the laughing-stock of her numerous rivals, death then cutting short her follies. Tibullus confesses to three important attachments, all unfortunate. Delia, Nemesis, and IsTeaera vie with each other in venal or capricious excesses, constant only in their inconstancy. All due allowance being made for literary embellish- ment or exaggeration, the loves of the Augustan poets, it must be confessed, present a sorry spectacle. No modern writer would own to being inspired by, or would dare to vaunt the charms of, such women as Corinna and Cynthia. The Eomans made an advance D 84 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY upon the Greeks especially in admitting Usus as a form of marriage, and thereby acknowledging the in- dividual rights of women. But sentimental regard for female honour, with all that that implies in the constitution of the family and of the community at large, was unknown in Kome, or existed only in the germ. Society has left far behind it the ideas of the Augustan age in regard to the relations of the sexes, and it now behoves us to trace the route by which it has travelled- CHAPTEK III CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY Amid the diversity of marriage customs in the world we can perceive a strong tendency in favour of the singleness of the union, due perhaps to the fact that the sexes are as nearly as possible equal in numbers. The statistics of civilised countries show a steady proportion of something like 104 male births to 100 female, the excess of the former being de- signed to repair the greater mortality of males occa- sioned by the struggle for existence. In the prime of life the equilibrium of the sexes is fairly established, although, as the result of migration, there may be found to be an undue proportion of men in one part of the world and of women in another. Hence monogamy is the rule even where polygamy is sanctioned by law and religion. It is, in fact, a necessity. 36 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY In polygamous and licentious communities the sensual appetites of men are ministered to by the transference of women from one master to another, but this custom is counteracted by the impulse of the mother to cling to the father of her child, and by the repugnance of men themselves to promiscuous families. The family instincts may of course be overruled, as they were in Eome, where, in the time of Augustus, it was thought expedient to pass enactments against celibacy and to offer special privileges to the fathers of three children. But the race that persistently disregards Nature's laws incurs the penalty of decay and extinction. It rarely happens that this drastic remedy is carried out to the full, as it appears to have been in the case of the Athenian civilisation. In the most abandoned communities there are never wanting philosophers and fanatics to plead for asceticism or moderation. Plato and Pythagoras preached in vain to the Greeks, but they exercised an important influence in the world by paving the way for the regenerative doctrines of Christianity. Other causes operated in the same direction. We have seen how Usus grew up in Eome as a corrective to the highly artificial and pernicious system of political marriage. Voluntary unions imply a certain freedom of choice on the part CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 37 of -women, and this is usually employed to strengthen the nuptial tie. The Roman wives, as soon as they were enabled to hold property in their own right, became their husbands' most inexorable creditors, and by that means secured the fragile bonds of Usus. It is true that Roman husbands sometimes repudiated a wife with a small fortune in order to take another with a larger one — Cicero is said to have done so — but the wife's property, for the most part, had a steadying effect upon marriage. This appears to have been the case also among the ancient Egyptians. In marriage settlements of the Ptolemaic period, dis- covered in the tombs, it is stipulated that if the husband takes a second wife he shall pay a fine to the first. And in polygamous countries at the present day, where a husband has the right to put his wife away whenever he pleases, the dowiy is the woman's sole guarantee against divorce. While Rome was preparing itself for the reception of the Christian doctrine of marriage, the barbarian peoples of the North were drifting equally into mono- gamy. History knows nothing of the influences that operated among them, but we may infer that they were similar to those we have traced among the heathen communities of the South. At all events, 38 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY when Csesar's legions carried the Roman eagles into Northern Europe, they encountered men who had nothing to learn from their conquerors in point of morality, but, on the contrary, had much to teach them. The German wife, according to Tacitus, was the help- mate of her husband, at home and in the field, in peace and in war. Heroines and priestesses were highly honoured. Each nation of antiquity, it has been remarked, attributed to the gods its distinctive national type, those of the Ethiopians, for example, being black. Northern mythology reflects accordingly much purer types of womanhood than the Greek. The Valkyries of the North were not voluptuous women, but stern and hardy amazons who could only be won by heroic deeds — battle-maidens who wedded none but their conquerors. Their power dwelt in their chastity, for once conquered by passion they became simple mortals. Not only was the German wife not bought or treated like a slave, but on the morning after marriage the husband made her a gift — a Morgengab, the origin of the English jointure.^ The self-respect engendered among Northern women appears to have been very great. When an army of the Teutons was overcome by Marius their wives ^ Laboulaye's Histoire Civile et Politiqice des Femmes. CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 39 pleaded that their honour might be respected. They were given to understand that they must submit to the ordinary conditions of slavery, and that night they all perished by their own hands, preferring death to dishonour. By the uncivilised German and Gaulish warriors this honourable sentiment of their women- kind was reciprocated in full. The Eomans discovered that the barbarian wives were the safest hostages, for at whatever sacrifice they were always redeemed. When in turn the barbarians overran the Eoman Empire they carried their high ideals of morality with them, and thus the seed of the great doctrine of Christianity that a man should have but one wife, and should cleave unto her, fell upon fertile ground. Whatever may have been or may still be the effects of the destructive criticism directed against the fabric of Christianity as a whole, there is no gainsaying the fact that Christian morality was promulgated at a singularly opportune moment in the world's history. The Jews had not previously distinguished themselves by the purity of their social life. If a divine law was laid down in the Old Testament for the regula- tion of marriage, it was very liberally interpreted. Polygamy was practised by the patriarchs and sanc- tioned by Moses. Gideon had seventy sons — the off- 40 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY spring assuredly of a well-stocked harem ; David de- nied himself nothing ; Eehoboam had eighteen wives and sixty concubines ; Solomon 700 wives and 300 con- cubines. The same system obtained until the time of Herod the Great, who, according to Josephus, had nine wives. But, alas for the blindness and the misdirected zeal of the early Christians ! they wholly miscon- ceived the value of the new faith as an instrument for the reorganisation of society. The potential good that dwelt in Christianity had to assert itself against the whole weight of the authority of the early Church. There is no more painful spectacle in history than the attitude maintained by the Church towards mar- riage during the first ten centuries of the Christian era. We can hardly say, indeed, that the Church has ever touched this subject with clean hands, for its tardy adoption of the sacramental view of marriage appears to have been dictated, if possible, by less worthy motives than its previous hostility to the nuptial union.^ For many centuries after Christ ' "The numberless ceremonial impediments that were invented, and occasionally dispensed with by the holy see, not only enriched the coffers of the Church, but gave a great ascendency over princes of all denominations, whose marriages were sanctioned or reprobated, their issue legitimatised or otherwise, and the succession of their thrones established or rendered precarious, according to the humour CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 41 marriage was regarded as a purely civil contract. It was bitterly assailed in that form by the fathers of the Church, and there was a particularly nauseous element in the reforming zeal of these holy men. Chastity was preached not because it was a good thing in itself, but because man's fall and the necessity for his redemption were traced to an indiscretion com- mitted in the Garden of Eden. The polluting influ- ence of passion was not thought to be redeemed by marriage. All intercourse between the sexes was discountenanced. It was taught that to have child- ren under any circumstances was a sin, as it only supplied food for death, and that woman was an in- strument of Satan. Continence was declared to be the perfection of virtue. In pursuance of this doc- trine, Origen, one of the fathers of the third century, did violence to his own person, and emasculation thereafter was not infrequently practised. Young people were enjoined to enter into vows of celibacy, and multitudes of them did so, nunneries and mon- asteries being established to receive them. Second or interest of the reigning pontiff ; besides a thousand nice and difficult scruples with which the clergy puzzled the understandings and loaded the consciences of the inferior orders of the laity, and which could only be unravelled by these their spiritual guides." — Blackstone's Commentaries. 42 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY marriages were denounced as especially abominable. The mystic union of Christ and the Church — which probably would never have been insisted upon but for the fact that the Latin word for church was feminine — was held to be symbolical of marriage, and second marriages were therefore regarded as a sort of infidelity to Heaven. St. Jerome in the fourth cen- tury, while treating simple marriage as evil and vicious in itself, reserved the worst vials of his wrath for what was called digamy.^ This pious father con- sidered that the " clean " animals in Noah's ark were those that had had no intercourse with their kind, the " unclean " being the remainder. Decrees were made forbidding married women to approach the altar or to touch the Eucharist, and it was even de- clared to be doubtful whether married persons co- habiting with each other could be saved. St. Chry- sostom, in the fifth century, boldly averred that if mau had not sinned the world would have been peopled by other means. All married persons were exhorted to pray for grace to keep themselves unde- filed, and wives were commended for declining the embraces of their husbands. ^ In pagan Rome, and among the Germans also, second marriages were discountenanced, but on the higher ground of the devotion due by a widow to her husband's memory. CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 43 As the result of these doctrines innumerable im- pediments were thrown in the way of marriage. The forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity were extended to a ridiculous length. Widows who had promised to live a single life were excommuni- cated if they married again. Any married woman who wished to be a nun was allowed to leave her husband and retire into a convent, and he was for- bidden to take another wife. All married persons were asked to abstain from cohabitation three days before the Communion and forty days after Easter ; next it was held to be as great a sin for a man to cohabit with his wife in Lent as to eat flesh ; then marriage was forbidden during Lent and at sundry other specified seasons, until, as an old writer quietly remarks, " there were but few weeks or days in the year in which people could get married at all." As inducements to chastity, stories were circulated as to men who had won a crown of glory through re- sisting the blandishments of courtesans and other vicious women, and as to virgins who had been miraculously cured of diseases through refusing to uncover to doctors. No ordinance, in short, was too monstrous, no tale too extravagant, to serve the pur- pose of checking the legitimate intercourse of the sexes. 44 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY Meanwhile the clergy married and unmarried themselves like other members of the community. Until the third century no restriction was placed upon the marriage of priests, but about that time the opinions of the fathers touching celibacy began to make it difficult for priestly unions to be entered into, and in the fourth century such unions, although common, were generally held to be inexpedient. In the fifth century priests were expected at least to abstain from the privileges of marriage, if not from marriage itself. Pope Innocent I. refused holy orders to any one who had married a widow, and commanded every priest to be deposed who should be guilty of the crime of having children by his wife. It was not, however, until the twelfth century that the wives of the clergy were driven forth for good, and that the Eoman Catholic priesthood was permanently estab- lished upon a celibate basis. During all this time the greatest disorders, both outside and inside the Church, prevailed. Marriage was restrained, but not indulgence. Chassez la nature, says the French pro- verb, elle revient au galop, and the Church contrived to furnish a striking exemplification of the proverb. Some of the popes led scandalous lives, and the clergy who did abstain from marriage kept concubines, some- CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 45 times in large numbers. A Spanish abbot was dis- covered in tlie year 1130 to have seventy concubines, and a bishop of Li^ge in 1274 was deposed for having sixty-five illegitimate children. Enactments had to be passed forbidding priests to live with their mothers and sisters, because of the prevalence of incest among them; nunneries and monasteries were hotbeds of debauchery; and congregations who had an unmarried priest to minister to them stipulated in some cases, with a view to the protection of their wives and daughters, that he should keep a concubine.^ In a similar spirit it was decreed by a council that no priest should be allowed to go out at night without a candle. Despite the views of the fathers and the various enactments of the Church against marriage, many devout persons never lost faith in an institution which had been pointedly approved by St. Paul, and although marriage was a civil contract with which, for a thousand years at least, the Church, in its collective capacity, would have nothing to do, those exemplary Christians acquired the habit of calling in a priest to bless the nuptial union, which they very properly regarded as an important event in their lives. Ulti- ^ Lea's History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 46 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY mately this appears to have suggested to the Church the expediency of taking under its control a ceremony which it was powerless to prevent. Down to the eleventh century marriages were made without ecclesi- astical interference. But in the twelfth century Peter the Lombard discovered the institution of the seven sacraments, or the sevenfold operation of the Spirit of God in baptism, the Lord's Supper, confir- mation, penance, orders, extreme unction, and matri- mony ; and the Church soon afterwards adopted this view, with results that have profoundly influenced society down to the present time. In Roman Catholic countries there exists a general feeling that marriages contracted without the agency of the Church are not binding ; and even in England many worthy people, ignorant of history, confound the divine origin of marriage with the performance of the nuptial rite by a clergyman. The sacramental view of marriage commended itself to the Council of Trent, which at the same time decreed that adultery did not dissolve the nuptial contract, notwithstanding that divorce for much less weighty reasons had been freely recognised, and indeed encouraged by the Church in the preceding cen- turies. Since the fourteenth century the attitude of the CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 47 Church of Rome towards marriage has remained un- changed. It is regarded as a ceremony which a priest alone can perform, while its essential uncleanness is asserted by the existence of nunneries and monasteries, to which women and men are invited to betake them- selves for the purpose of leading a holy life. Nor did the Eeformation essentially modify the ecclesias- tical law in England beyond allowing the clergy to marry, and sanctioning marriage at all seasons of the year. After the pope's supremacy was overthrown, the doctrine and discipline of the Church with respect to marriage continued to be pretty much as before. Edward VI contemplated allowing divorce for "adultery, desertion, cruel usage, or perpetual con- tention." This would have been a very liberal measure, but unhappily its projector died before it was carried into effect, and the English Divorce Act was not passed till the year 1857. Other European countries have, like England, established civil liberty with respect to the marriage contract, but the ecclesi- astical spirit remains everywhere opposed to divorce, and inculcates the impurity of an instinct which it identifies with " original sin." It would seem that in the course of these many centuries the Christian doctrines of purity have prac- 48 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY tically implanted a new instinct in our nature. For the conviction entertained in Christian communities as to passion being an unholy thing is now nothing less than an instinct, and one that has shaped our entire social life. The glimpses already given of pagan and savage customs enable us to judge of the extent of the moral revolution that Christianity has effected. Outside certain schools of philosophy, such notions of purity as now prevail were unknown to the ancients. Nor do they obtain among nations or peoples who have never come under the sway of Christianity. The stigma attached by the Church to all that relates to the reproduction of the species is a fact of which the most enlightened Englishman at tlie present day is more or less conscious. What other influence, we may ask, could betray a writer like Lecky into de- claring it to be " an ultimate fact in human nature that the sexual side of our being is the lower side, and that some degree of shame may appropriately be attached to it"?^ It would surely be difficult to maintain upon strictly philosophical grounds that an instinct or an appetite upon which the very existence of the human race depends is essentially a degraded one. As well stigmatise eating and sleeping as * Lecky's History oj European Morals, CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND MORALITY 49 shameful iudulgeuces, or life itself as a discreditable thing. It is true that some of our most necessary- appetites, besides the sexual oue, are the subject of a very widespread moral reprobation, eating and sleep- ing being of the number. Many men boast of their love of art, for example, but few are prepared to boast of their love of beef or mutton. In these sentiments the influence of the Church is again to be traced, asceticism or the mortification of the flesh having been regarded from the earliest times as conducive to holiness. These various influences have not been uniform in their operation throughout Christendom ; they have been strengthened or weakened by the special circumstances of each country. Thus the public sentiment of England, with regard to certain breaches of the moral law, is much more stringent than that of France. Virtuous women are common in English literature, whereas in French they are exceedingly rare.^ In French society hardly any stigma attaches ^ Professor St. Marc Girardin, in bis Cours de Litterature Bra- matiqiie, relates the following curious experience : — "Quanii je faisais h, la Sorbonne, il y a vingt ans, la com- paraison de I'expression des divers sentiments du coeur humain, j'allais cherchant partout dans le drame et dans le roman modernes. une femnie honnete ; je priais meme mes amis de s'associer a ma E 50 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY to a faux manage, and although young girls are jealously guarded, married women are tacitly allowed an amount of freedom which in England would entail upon them a loss of consideration. We have already spoken of the evil results of the mariage de conveiiance in destroying the sanctity of the nuptial tie. It is beyond all doubt responsible for the laxity of French morals, in both a literary and a social sense. If we observe the disfavour with which the public in a theatre watch the efforts of a parent or guardian to marry a girl to some detested suitor, and with what delight they see true love get its way, we need not be surprised at the indulgence shown to the victims of a system of loveless marriage, which in France is sustained mainly by its connexion with the laws of property. The growth of Puritanism iu England again has had effects which are felt to this day ; whereas in France that movement, with its recherche ; ils me repondaient en riant que les femmes honnetes abondaient dans le monde en depit de la medisance mais qu'elles etaient rares ou introuvables dans la litterature. Je viens de recommencer pour I'amour conjugal la quete que je faisais d'une femme honnSte et j'ai cherche si au ITeme siecle, au 18eme ou de nos jours, cet amour, soit dans son devouement tendre et passionne, soit dans ses fclicites innocentes avait ete represente quelque part. J'ai k peine trouv^, 9a et Ik, quelques esquisses de ce senti- ment." 'HRISTIAN MARRIAGE AND iMORALlTY 51 long train of moral and political consequences, was nipped in the bud. If we turn to Eussia, we find women still treated like slaves or cattle among the masses of the popula- tion. In novels and dramas of contemporary life in Eussia the wife is represented as being in complete subjection to her husband, while among both sexes the loosest ideas of morality prevail.^ Eussia, although ranking as a civilised country, brings us i^ato touch, in fact, with the customs and instincts of savagery, due to the long existence of serfdom. Until the reign of Peter the Great, Eussian women enjoyed no social or domestic authority whatever, and wives could be killed by their husbands with impunity.^ Ireland, on the other hand, presents the example of a country where the purity doctrines of the Church have had the fullest sway. That Irish ^ See the popular dramas of Tolstoi and Ostrowsky. 2 Levesque's Histoire de Jiussie. Rulhiere in his Histoire de r Anarchic de Pologne relates that in the reign of Catherine the Court amused itself by celebrating "les noces d'un bouffon avec une chevre." The morality of that Court is also reflected in an anecdote told by the same authority of a giand-duke, one of Catherine's husbands : " II avait pris I'envoye du Roi de Prusse dans une singuliere faveur. II voulait que cet envoye avant son depart e Ibid. POLYGAMY 193 an age to understand the ceremony, the female Hindu is driven into marriage by religious considerations, the ceremony being regarded as a sacrament essential to her entrance into that final state of beatitude which is the hope of every follower of Brama. Unlike the Mahomedans, with whom marriage is merely a tem- porary arrangement, the Hindus have contrived an elaborate series of nuptial rites, which are to be ex- plained no doubt by the terribly serious nature of the contract from the point of view of Hindu law and custom. But while the Mahomedan woman may be, and sometimes is, put to death for adultery, the Hindu wife who has been faithless is merely deserted. Within the sphere of English influence, at all events, she is not liable to further punishment. No other course could be sanctioned by English opinion. Married while children, Hindu wives are often neglected while stiU young ; at the best they share the attentions of a husband with several rivals. To punish their inconstancy while the husband is allowed to fill his zenana with women would, according to Western notions, be a monstrous injustice. Among the Mongolians, who form the third great section of the polygamous races of the world, marriage isconducted pretty much upon the Mahomedan plan — o 194 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY that is to say, matches are made by go-betweens, and the nuptial ceremony has no sacred or binding char- acter. In China women have no legal status. They are the absolute slaves first of their fathers and secondly of their husbands ; the father may sell his daughter and the husband his wife, and a widow is the property of her deceased husband's relations, who generally dispose of her to the highest bidder.^ Con- cubines live under the same roof as the wife. They are bought and sold without any formalities, and are often the first sacrifice made by a Chinaman who has to reduce his establishment. Marriages are arranged without any selection being exercised by either of the parties ; and it is understood that, however ugly or deformed a bride may prove to be, she cannot be rejected by the husband after she has unveiled her- self in his presence. In a recently published work in French,^ General Tcheng-ki-Tong, military attach^ to the Chinese Lega- tion in Paris, denies that his countrymen are poly- gamous, but as he admits that the Chinese concubine enjoys a legal status, his argument appears to be some- what sophistical. The wife is obliged to accept the ^ Cooper's Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce. * Le Thedtre des Chinois, by General Tcheng-ki-Tong. POLYGAMY 195 coucubine openly, and the manner of their introduc- tion to each other is regulated by custom. Upon entering her new abode the concubine is expected to show her respect for the wife by four salutations. The wife receives the first salutation seated, at the second she rises, and the third and fourth she returns. If these formalities are disregarded on either side domestic trouble ensues, and the plight in which the unfortunate husband then finds himself is a frequent theme of satire in Chinese comedy. Among the Buddhists, as among the Mahomedans, a woman's property has a steadying effect upon her matrimonial fortunes, but her personal claims to consideration are nowhere recognised. Throughout the East it may be said, generally, that the instinct of selection, and many concurrent senti- ments which tend to the development of higher social states out of lower ones, are systematically repressed or violated. We know by familiar experience that every breach of Nature's rules involves a penalty. The man who disregards the principles of health drags out a feeble and unprofitable existence, if he does not promptly pay for his temerity with his life. Nations are subject to the same law, and in the virtual subordination of the teeming millions of Asia 196 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY to a handful of vigorous Europeans we see the penalty that the " changeless East " is paying for its many centuries of misguided fanaticism and mistaken self-indulgence. What have the vast populations of the East contributed to literature, art, or science, for the past thousand years? Practically nothing. It may be said that these things are not progress, and perhaps they are not — the question cannot be settled by puny mortals who know nothing of the true destinies of the human race or the final goal to which evolution leads. But if we test the social methods of the East and the West by the sum of their contri- bution to human happiness, the balance, we imagine, turns in our favour. And such advantages as peoples of the European stock have won over the rest of the world in all that distinguishes civilisation from bar- barism may fairly be ascribed to monogamy. For this is not only the inspiration of love, and conse- quently of all the refining arts, but by the operation of selection and heredity it is the source of cumula- tive knowledge, or rather of cumulative capacity, in the races brought under its influence. The weU-born Turk or Persian, for example, is the son of a mother who is wholly destitute of intellectual culture, and who passes her time lounging in the bath and gossip- POLYGAMY 197 ing with lier fellow -slaves. What can be the results of heredity in such a case ? What intellectual ad- vancement is possible among a people each successive generation of whom is dragged down to the level of barbarism by maternal influence ? There is no better illustration of the sterilising effects of polygamy upon the human mind than the condition of the literature of polygamous races. Where the passion of love in the European sense of the word is unknown, poetry and fiction may be said to be in their infancy. This is eminently so in Turkey and Persia; and in these countries, moreover, the stage — another important vehicle of sentiment — has hardly risen above the level of our Punch and Judy show. Turkish and Persian plays consist for the most part of illustrations of certain stereotyped reli- gious subjects or exhibitions of the merest buffoonery, sometimes of a disgusting character. Under the influence of French and Italian models, a more vital species of performance has recently been springing up, but the motives of this nascent Mahomedan drama, judging by some samples recently published by a French writer, M. Alphonse Cilli^re, are still in the embryo state. The most interesting of M. Cil- lifere's translations is a study of harem jealousy — a 198 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY very different sentiment of course from that which occasionally agitates the bosom of the European wife. Ziba-Khanoum, the heroine of the Turkish play, has no desire to monopolise her lord's attentions ; she merely resents the fact that Cho' Le-Kanoum has had a prettier dress than herself, and is the recipient of one or two other special favours. Chinese sentiment is comparatively liberal. Even to a Chinaman, however, the part assigned to love in European novels and plays appears eminently absurd.^ Filial piety is in China the great dramatic motive, and a secondary one is literary ambition, or the struggle to win a prize in the numerous scholastic competitions established throughout the Empire. The "juvenile lead" or the "walking gentleman" of the Chinese stage is usually, therefore, a dutiful son or a successful student. The philosophy of Confucius ^ General Tcheng-ki-Tong in his Thedtre des Chinois remarks that the Chinese stage is very far from attaching the same import- ance to love as the French. " L'amour tourmente, tyranise," he observes, "paraitrait a nos yeux une exaggeration. Ces tempetes violentes qui s'elevent dans le cceur et ne laissent aprfes elles que des lendemains sans espoir, sont au-dessus de notre imagination et ne pourraient, dans tous les cas, qu'utre tres-rares dans notre societe ou I'autorite paternelle est absolue. II est done aise de com- prendre que les grands drames de l'amour n'auraient, devant notre public, aucune chance de succfes," POLYGAMY 199 continues to be the basis of all Chinese culture, while the modern literature of the Celestials consists mainly of endless prefaces to and comments upon the works of ancient writers. Although persistently thwarted by human caprice, Nature never ceases to strive for the accomplishment of her aims, and we can perceive a tendency in the customs of Mahomedanism to break down under the strain she imposes. Thus the marriage of first cousins is looked upon in all Mahomedan countries with special favour. In noting this fact Lane remarks that such unions are generally lasting, and that they have in most cases a true basis of affection, owing to the parties having been ac- quainted with each other in early life. Can the favour with which these matches are viewed be due to a public consciousness of their propriety in point of mutual affection ? Possibly. In that case the awakening sense of the superiority of a love-match to the ordinary Mahomedan marriage may be regarded as the thin end of the wedge. There is certainly little doubt as to the gradual subversion of that curse of Mahomedan life — the veil. In Egypt, according to Lane, " motives of coquetry will frequently induce a woman to expose her face to a man when she thinks 200 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY she may appear to do so unintentionally." " In Persia a glimpse of a lady's face is seldom to be got, save by stratagem, or by what is considered an immodest act on her part, the raising of a corner of the veil by the lady herself; but the Persian belle yet contrives to find a way of rewarding her admirer with a glance." ^ In Turkey the difficulty presented by the veil has been ingeniously turned. " So coquettishly is the transparent muslin folded over the nose and mouth that the delicate cloud seems but to heighten each charm. Far, very far is it from hiding the wearer's features from the profaning eye of man."^ It is by such devices that Nature seeks to regain her ravished rights. Failing the recuperative power re- quired for its revival, an ailing race succumbs in time to a stronger competitor ; the fittest, in a word, survives. On the face of the earth, as on a scroll, how many records, lost to history, may have been written and erased by successive races or civilisations ? Mormonism, free love, and other new-fangled substitutes for monogamy adopted in America are experiments bound in natural course to fail, because they conflict with instincts which, having grown up ^ Wills's Persia as it is. ^ Mrs. Harvey's Turkish Harems and Circassian ITomes. POLYGAMY 201 during many generations of European or American life, cannot be eradicated in a day. Not one of the polygamous societies of the West has succeeded in establishing itself upon a permanent basis. In the working of the system of "complex marriage," as practised at Oneida Creek, we find a remarkable illus- tration of the force of inherited sentiment, and the virtual failure of Father Noyes's community may be regarded as typical of the fate of all such experiments unless they happen to be backed up by religious faith of a powerful and enduring character. Complex marriage is a euphemism for free love, its principle being that within the limits of the community any men or women may cohabit by natural consent, the children being reared in a common nursery. Considering that Father Noyes's adherents are without exception of European blood, we should ex- pect the growth of exclusive attachments to be the bane of the free love system, and in point of fact that has proved to be the case. The members of the Oneida Creek community find in practice, says Nord- hofif, " a strong tendency towards what they call seK- ish love — that is to say, the attachment of two per- sons to each other, and their desire to be true to each other — and there are here and there in their publica- 202 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY tions signs that there has been suffering among their young people on this account." ^ The same writer reports a significant speech delivered by Father Noyes at a meeting of the community held for the purpose of censuring the backsliding of a member. " Our brother," said Noyes, " has fallen under the too common temptation of selfish love, and a desire to wait upon and cultivate an exclusive intimacy with the woman who is to bear a child through him. This is an insidious temptation very apt to attack people under such circumstances, but it must nevertheless be struggled against." ^ Father Noyes was mistaken in supposing that his theories of marriage could be successfully enforced by argument. A preference for free love on the part of both sexes could only be established by heredity — " fixed," that is to say, in the course of many generations — and when this result had been achieved by artificial means, the community left to its own devices would slowly re- vert to monogamy, which is obviously intended to be the ultimate condition of the race, or an important factor, at all events, in psychological evolution. ^ Nordlioff s Communistic Societies in the United States, » Jbid. OHAPTEE XIV THE FAMILY INSTINCTS The course of our inquiry into the relations of the sexes from the earliest times will have prepared the reader for a refutation of the commonly accepted axiom that human nature is the same in all ages and all over the world. No fallacy could be greater or, indeed, more self-evident than this ; and the modern poet, dramatist, or novelist who acted upon it, — who neglected the spirit of his own age in order to follow classical models, — would find himself hopelessly at variance with the sentiment of his contemporaries. In the relations of members of a family towards each other, more especially those of parents towards child- ren, the same evolutionary process goes on that we have traced in regard to matrimony. The stern Eoman father who exercised over his children the power of life and death has been slowly transformed 204 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY by circumstances into the meek, submissive, police- ridden householder and ratepayer, who, if he dared to lift his hand to a disobedient son, would be punished by the tribunals. Simultaneously with the emanci- pation of women there has come about the disintegra- tion of the family. In France and the Latin countries generally, parental authority being intimately bound up with the legal code, continues to be more or less respected ; among the Anglo-Saxon communi- ties it has become merely nominal. Englishmen are apt to be amused at the reverence shown in French drama and literature to the sacred names of " father " and " mother.'* But in France the manifestation of filial respect is as real as that of the contrary sentiment in this country, where, on the stage at least, a man who wept at parting from his parents, or who even con- sulted them about his love affairs, would be laughed at. Broadly speaking, the more highly developed our social relations become, the more is the in- dividual citizen subordinated to the community, and the smaller is his power of initiative or right of private judgment. The resident in a great town may have his own ideas of adorning his dwelling or ministering to his comfort ; but if these conflict with the interests of the community, the State steps in THE FAMILY INSTINCTS 205 and restrains liim from carrying out his caprice. In accordance with this principle, the rights of a father or mother, sacred in the eyes of the ancients, have been seriously encroached upon by the State, which requires that a parent shall train his children in con- formity not with his own ideas, but with those of the community ; and, as in the case of marriage customs, the modifications of sentiment involved tend to become acceptable. When a new law is passed, like that of compulsory vaccination, it may for a time be felt as a hardship by individuals, but in the end the people adapt themselves to their new con- ditions, and men accept as natural and proper what their fathers may have regarded as an exercise of tjn-anny. We have more than once turned to the drama as an index of the sentiment of a particular period. Historians, who concern themselves more with names and dates than with the spirit of the age they deal with, leave us no other resource. Perhaps no better guide to the truth could be desired. There are always two kinds of sentiment reflected in the drama and the literature generally of a people ; there are those that a man finds in his heart and those that he finds in his imagination. The latter serve to explain and 206 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY to complete the former. The characters conceived by the poet or the dramatist are to some extent ideal of course, but unless they stand in intimate relation to the heart and the imagination of the author's con- temporaries they fail to produce the requisite impres- sion of sincerity and truth. Judged by the literary standard, the family instincts of different ages and peoples, from the dawn of civilisation in Greece to the present day, are precisely what, having regard to the evolution of society, we should expect them to be. From having unlimited confidence in his own authority, which in his eyes was based alike upon nature, law, and custom, the father has become timid, vacillating, and weak. He no longer commands ; he entreats. For his loss of dignity and authority he endeavours to compensate by a display of tenderness. That the part thus played by the father in society has de- generated, we do not say ; but it has changed, and is changing, and the fact is one with which the sociolo- gist is bound to reckon. As an example of the different ideas entertained of the authority of parents at different periods, let the reader compare for a moment the OEdipus of Sophocles with the King Lear of Shakespeare. Both poets treat of the ingratitude of children, but they do THE FAMILY INSTINCTS 207 SO in a widely different spirit, Sophocles vindicates the sanctity of parental authority by the most im- pressive means. The vengeance of CEdipus towards his sons is implacable. When Polynices implores forgiveness, (Edipus refuses to answer him, because it would be a profanation of a father's lips to hold communion with an ungrateful son. Entreated by his host to speak to Polynices, CEdipus, in recognition of the sacred law of hospitality, consents at last to break silence, but only to pronounce a curse upon the offender. The justice of the gods forbids any exercise of his clemency, because it is necessary that the out- rage offered to the majesty of the father should be avenged. Such was the early Greek view of the parental relationship. Lear's personality has few of the solemn attributes of his Athenian prototype. If he has been driven forth by his two undutiful daughters, Eegan and Gonerill, the fault is his own ; he has despised the counsels of his faithful Kent and mistaken the true affection of his other daughter Cor- delia, and the thought of retribution for his wrongs is lost in the pathos of the ending to his poor mis- guided life. As the ancient civilisations lasted many centuries, they found time to work out some of the moditica- 208 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY tions of sentiment which inevitably occur in a society passing from the rude barbaric to the highly cultured stage. Euripides is less stern and severe in his views than the earlier poets. His heroes preach clemency and pardon. Menander and the writers of his school are almost as indulgent as the moderns in respect of the relations of father and son. "A good father," says Menander, " ought not to be angry with his own flesh and blood. If he would have his son watch over him in his old age, let him give the youth what he wants." In Eome the same spirit of moderation was developed from the austere customs of the early Eepublic, the father gradually relinquishing what may be called the functions of the magistrate in order to take up those of the parent as the word is now understood. The change is clearly indicated in one of the dramas of Terence. A father is resolved to be severe with his son, according to the ancient custom, and by his rigorous discipline he drives the young man into foreign service. Thenceforward he knows no peace of mind. He is given up to remorse, and lives a life of hardship in order to punish himself for his cruelty to his son, whom he ulti- mately welcomes home with open arms. In the same play the paternal authority is attacked from THE FAMILY INSTINCTS 209 another side. Father No. 2 preaches the maxims of the old school. His son argues against him. " Fathers," says the latter, " are unjust ; they would have their sons be as old as themselves ; they make no allowance for the passions of youth. If I had a son I would be indulgent to him ; he should be as ready to confess his faults to me as I should be to forgive them." Plautus also reflects the growing relaxation of paternal authority. In the latter days of the Empire nothing of the old severity of manners remained. To a great extent the Christian communities of Europe have solved the problem of domestic discip- line de novo. They have long been drifting towards a subversion of parental authority altogether, and, in this country at least, the goal has almost been reached. In France, thanks to the Code Napoleon, parents still retain a show of authority ; but although the dramatists and novelists treat the title of father with a degree of respect unknown to the Anglo-Saxon races, they do not hesitate, on occasion, to exhibit the paternal relationship in a ludicrous light.^ The change has been in progress since the time of 1 See, for example, that admirable comedy by Augier aad Saudeau, Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier. 210 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY Moli^re. In the last century Eousseau and other writers lifted up their voices against the so-called degradation of paternity, but without effect, the evolution of sentiment being determined by subtle causes which a literary critic can hardly hope to combat. There is no need to study the stage at the present time with regard to the state of the family instincts ; but in order to follow out consistently our plan of observation, we may remark that the student of sociology who cares to consult the contemporary drama will find the father occupying there a very uncertain position, being only saved from ridicule, as a rule, by his affection for his children — an affection wholly divorced from a sense of his own authority or personal dignity. In a word, the paternal character among modern Englishmen may be said to have lost all its majesty, and to have become trivial, or at least politically unimportant. The maternal relationship has been of necessity more stable than the paternal from the earliest times, but even that appears to be losing ground, sons and daughters of the Anglo- Saxon race being careful nowadays to emancipate themselves, and what is more important, being allowed to do so, from almost all parental restraint. In a still greater degree than it has yet done, THE FAMILY INSTINCTS 211 parental authority is likely to pass from the individual to the State. We cannot affect to view the process with uneasiness. All the great social problems now claiming attention — problems of disease, poverty, edu- cation, and even heredity — are only to be solved by such wholesale measures as the State can undertake. The family is too small a unit for the purposes of scientific experiment ; the head of the family must subordinate himself to the head of the community. In the ancient civilisations parental authority decayed before anything was ready to take its place. The society of the present day is more happily circum- stanced, and as the logical result of the social tend- encies above traced we may confidently look forward to an application of the principles of social science upon a scale hitherto unknown. CHAPTER XV THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY Many important truths are forced upon us by a con- sideration of the foregoing facts — truths which sooner or later cannot fail to affect our social life — and a rapid review of these may fittingly bring our task to a close. The first, and perhaps the greatest lesson of heredity is that the individual man is much less the arbiter of his own destinies than his pride would have him believe. Born to a heritage of physical and mental capacity, of instincts and sentiments that he has the power to alter only in a limited degree, he may be said to be the creature of circumstances, the sport of fate. He is a waif and stray upon the ocean of life, driven hither and thither by currents over which he has no control, and whose existence for the most part he does not even suspect. All philoso- phical and religious systems are faulty which attribute THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 213 to the individual a full responsibility for his physical or moral condition. No man by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature. No man by taking thought can make himself wise or witty or virtuous ; he may do something for the improvement of Ms character, as by judicious diet and exercise he may add to his height or weight, but the main lines of his moral and 'physique are determined for him. The results of Nature's care are shown in the moulding of the species ; the individual is the subject of countless experiments, successful or unsuccessful, all directed to the great end of the discovery of the fittest. Life may be said to be ever striving to assume the most suitable form ; it gropes its way as it goes, and avails itself of all the aids to progress it can find upon the route to its unknown goal. In an interesting speculation upon the future status of women, Herbert Spencer assumes that the legal bond of marriage will cease to be tolerated unless it happens to coexist with a bond of affection between the parties.^ We do not see in the existing condition ^ " As monogamy is likely to be raised in cliaracter by public sentiment requiring that the legal bond shall not be entered into unless it represents the natural bond, so perhaps it may be that the maintenance of the legal bond will come to be held improper if the natural bond ceases. Largely increased facilities for divorce point 214 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY of society, or in the past experience of the race, any sufficient warrant for this view. The welfare of the children, not the convenience of parents, is most likely to determine the course of domestic evolution. Mainly for the children's sake was the legal bond of wedlock instituted ; for their sake it will probably be main- tained, during the whole of that phase of human life, at all events, with which we are acquainted. It is true that the State is usurping parental functions with regard to the education, the hours of labour of the young, and like matters ; but the establishment of a great State nursery, which would inevitably attend the abolition of the legal responsibility of parents, still lies far beyond the range of practical legislation. However organised, it is doubtful whether a common nursery would be a boon to its inmates. A common nursery was one of the features of the free love to the probability that whereas, while permanent monogamy was being evolved, the union by law (originally an act of purchase) was regarded as an essential part of marriage, and the union by affection non-essential, and whereas at present the union by law is thought to be the more important, and the union by affection the less im- portant, there will come a time when a union by affection will be held to be of primary moment, and a union by law as of secondary moment ; whence reprobation of marital relations in which the union by affection has dissolved." — Herbert Spencer's rrinciples of Sociology. THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 215 community at Oneida Creek. Children after being weaned were affiliated to the community, and Nordhoff says they looked healthy enough, but that they lacked buoyancy and gladness, as though they missed the exclusive love of a father and mother. In the state of society conceived by Herbert Spencer the con- venience of individuals would be consulted at the expense of the race, whereas in evolution the contrary principle prevails ; it is the individual who is sacrificed to the community. Of the latter truth we have an example in the matter of large families and over-population. Lord Karnes, a very shrewd thinker in his day, said he was tempted to blame Providence for developing appetite in the youth of both sexes long before they were able to maintain a family. We can now perceive, however, that Providence knows its own business best, and that the efforts of Malthus and other philanthropists to keep down population are really directed against the most powerful of the civilising agencies. Under stress of over-population, the predatory race develops into the agricultural, and the agricultural into the manufacturing ; the same spur of necessity impels us to go on improving the arts and appliances of civilised life. That the number of mouths to be fed in England 216 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY should be increasing at the rate of 1000 a day is a substantial guarantee that our civilisation cannot rest upon its oars, but must keep advancing. Indirectly the poor man who brings forth children he cannot feed is a public benefactor ; he renders the struggle for life more acute, and by that means stimulates the energies of his race. In throwing his family upon the world in the vague hope that they will somehow be provided for, or without any reflection at all, li« unconsciously obeys the dictates of the Geist der Gattung of Schopenhauer — the Genius of the Species, which is constantly sacrificing the individual to its higher ends. Modern philanthropy strives by all the means in its power to defeat the natural laws of progress. This it does by placing the interests of the individual above those of the species. In social life it succours the infirm and the unfit, and encourages them to multiply their kind. In politics it labours to ward off or to mitigate the hardships produced by over-population — to retard, therefore, the great natural crises by which peoples and nations are regenerated. Had philan- thropy of the modern stamp existed as a force in central and southern Asia five or ten thousand years ago, it would probably have exerted itself to prevent THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 217 the great westward flow of the Aryan race. Both politicians and philanthropists will probably be in- duced to modify their aims and methods when the principles of evolution are fully understood. As to marriage, there is no evidence that mere affection can ever be a sufficiently enduring bond between the sexes to safeguard the interests of the offspring. Although in exceptional cases the play of the elective affinities may be trusted to bring about lasting unions, the general attraction of the sexes for each other is such that unions of affection will always be liable to be lightly formed and as lightly broken. The qualities that attract a man or a woman in one of the opposite sex are frequently such as exist in a thousand men or women in the same community. What guarantee of stability, then, would an ordinary love union possess ? If the legal bond ever became subordinate to or dependent upon the bond of affection, we should practically be revert- ing to the primitive conditions of communal marriage from which our ancestors long ago emerged. But if monogamy is likely to remain unchanged in its main features, so long as the State is unprepared to take parental charge of the children born within its borders, there are many minor modifications of the 218 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY system which public opinion, based upon a knowledge of heredity, may be trusted to bring about. The general recognition of the moral side of heredity will tend to revolutionise our time-honoured method of match-making in which the moral fitness of the parties is never taken into account. Physical fitness is so far considered that the union of a young girl with an old man, or a young man with an old woman, for the sake of wealth or worldly position, is generally con- demned. The deformity of one of the parties is also deemed to be a bar to marriage. But the existence in a given family of insanity, drunkenness, or vicious propensities of any sort, is not yet thought to be a disqualification to any of the marriageable members of that family, provided they appear to be free from the congenital taint. No heed is given to the possi- bility of the disease existing in those persons in a latent form, to be developed by them in after life or transmitted to their children in a simple or a meta- morphosed state. To this fertile source of misery and suffering we may assume the society of the future will open its eyes with a view to the establishment of a system of moral as well as physical selection. There has frequently been acted in London during the past twenty years a comedy in which the prin- THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 219 ciples both of moral and physical heredity, curiously enough, are unconsciously outraged by the author.^ A vain, pompous, selfish, hypocritical, unscrupulous father has a couple of pretty daughters engaged to two young men, one of whom has been blind from birth. The author seeks to enlist our sympathies with his matrimonial scheme, and, so far as the unreflecting portion of the public is concerned, succeeds. Yet the two girls, charming though they be in appearance, are presumably by hereditary influence, that is to say, as the daughters of such a father, moral lepers, born with a predisposition to vice, while one of them mating with a blind man may be expected to produce physically imperfect children ! To those acquainted with the operation of heredity the spectacle thus presented is as painful as would be that of the beautiful and virtuous heroine of a play, being forced to wed some old, deformed, and miserly suitor. The performance of the comedy in question passes without protest from tlie public of the present day. If we mistake not, a time will come when such a story will be utterly repugnant to popular sentiment. How the difficulties connected with moral heredity * The Two Roses, by James Albery. 220 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY may be solved in the future relations of the sexes we can only surmise. As civiKsation tends to foster in us a faculty of self-regulation, — the subordination of private to public interests, — it may become obligatory upon families or communities to keep exact genealogical records, showing the moral pedi- gree of every one of their members. Under this system, when a marriage was proposed the moral pedigrees of the parties would be consulted, and their fitness or unfitness for each other ascertained. Supposing both to have a particular form of con- genital weakness likely to be fostered in their off- spring, the marriage would be pronounced inex- pedient, and public opinion would uphold the ruling. And while unions likely to breed mental or physical disease would be rendered difficult, if not impossible, by the force of public sentiment, those favourable to the species would be encouraged. It would not follow that any great number of people would be disqualified for marriage altogether, although no doubt this would happen in certain cases. They would be compelled to choose their partners upon rational principles, every tendency to degeneration being as far as possible counteracted. The known dangers of consanguinity have already THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 221 created in the public mind an instinctive aversion to unions of near kin, which among primitive races are freely entered into ; and we may expect this feeling by and by to cover all unions which, if not con- sanguineous in name, are so in fact — that is to say, by the physical or mental predisposition of the parties. Many couples are to be found in a large town, or even in a populous parish, who, although not related in blood, are, on account of the similarity of their constitutional defects, as unfitted to marry with each other as the brothers and sisters of a family in which there exists a streak of insanity. We have seen how neglect or ignorance of this principle leads to the deterioration of all exclusive aristocracies and castes. At present not only is the question of the moral fitness of a bride and bridegroom left out of consideration, but there are few people able to learn with certainty anything of the idiosyncrasies of their own grandfathers or grandmothers. We may look, further, for a strengthening of the existing sentiment in favour of marriages of afiection, so that the parent who constrains his son or daughter to make an objectionable match will incur public reprobation, A wholesome contempt is already felt in English middle-class life for people who marry 222 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY for money. In France the mariage de convenance, deeply rooted as it is, cannot indefinitely withstand the hostility of literature and the stage, the frequent condonation of adultery in the works of French novelists and dramatists being in reality an un- conscious protest against loveless unions. The tendencies we have described will favour the equalisation of the sexes before the law. All the civil disabilities of the female sex, having their origin in the stealing, buying, or selling of wives, will disappear ; women will be allowed to dispose of their affections as they will, and to exercise their talents in any profession they may care to take up. Men will continue, however, to govern, by virtue of their greater physical strength and endurance. The necessities of child-bearing will always be a bar to the free exercise by women of political rights. For this reason the sphere of their influence will necessarily continue to be domestic ; whence a radical difference between the instincts and senti- ments of the two sexes, which the experience of widows or spinsters who may be independent house- holders and citizens will never modify in any essential degree. Divorce as understood in England is bound THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 223 to undergo some modification. All attempts to govern the relations of the sexes by mediaeval canon law wiW have to be abandoned, and marriage will come to be regarded even by the Church as a purely civil contract. Despite the fundamental difference in the instincts of the sexes, divorce will probably be procurable by wives and husbands upon precisely equal grounds. These grounds may be expected to vary from time to time, from adultery to mere incompatibility of temper. In this respect the United States of America are passing through an interesting stage of experience. Hardly any two states of the Union regard the question of marriage from the same standpoint. In New York infidelity is the only recognised ground for divorce. In Virginia, however, a marriage may be dissolved if one of the parties is a fugitive from justice ; in "West Virginia and Kentucky the notorious im- morality of a husband before marriage, provided it has been unknown to the wife, is, upon its discovery by her, a valid cause of divorce ; while in Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, and Ehode Island relief may be sought by one of the parties to the marriage bond who can allege any gross neglect of duty against the other. Incompatibility of temper is 224 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY taken in the widest sense of the word, and may imply no more, as in Illinois, than that both parties agree to a divorce. Among these various systems it is impossible to decide upon abstract grounds which is the best. Eventually that form of divorce will prevail in America and elsewhere which may be found to be the most expedient. The system finally adopted by every nation will be the one best calculated to safeguard communal as opposed to individual interests. In social ethics generally we shall probably come to recognise with Maudsley that there are "three great neuroses — the epileptic, the insane, and the criminal." For thousands of years the world has been governed upon the principle that man is morally a free agent — free to practise vice or virtue as he chooses. "We pity the hunchback, and we have nothing but execration for the drunkard or the thief. We have but one law for the rich and the poor, the enlightened and the ignorant. In the case of insanity alone is any allowance made for moral irresponsibility. The lunatic who murders his fellow is not sentenced to death, but ordered to be confined during Her Majesty's pleasure. Yet the criminal who comes into conflict with the law again and again THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 225 through an hereditary tendency no less inevitable than insanity is subjected to an increase of punish- ment for every fresh offence. We read of miserable men and women who have made repeated appear- ances in a court of justice, and who have passed two-thirds of their lives in prison. Some day the law will recognise that these wretched beings are not criminals in the true sense of the word, but modified lunatics, and will deal with them accord- ingly. In the light of heredity, the administrative methods of Christianity itself appear to call for revision. Religion has ceased in a great measure to concern itself with the cure of the maimed, the halt, and the blind, and it now becomes a question whether moral defects are not largely to be placed in the same category, and whether the object of philanthropists ought not to be to strike at evil in its germ rather than in its fruits. It may be that the problems of crime and sin, which have so long baffled law and religion, are not so insoluble after all. Under the enlightened system that we contemplate, all the reforming influences of the world would be brought to bear upon man before he was born and not after. The potter moulds his vessel while his clay is soft, not after it has passed Q 226 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY througli the furnace. In being born man undergoes the firing process, so to speak, which fixes his character for good or evil. That prevention is better than cure will probably become the motto of the churches as well as of the medical schools. The questions of an hereditary monarchy and a governing aristocracy are of political rather than scientific interest. Like all other questions affecting the welfare of the community, they will eventually be settled by considerations of expediency. On the simple ground of heredity, no royal family or aris- tocracy in the world occupies a tenable position. Nothing could be more plausible in a scientific sense than the idea of a class moulded of finer clay than the rest of the community ; but unfortunately all exclusive castes, as we have seen, have been placed upon a false basis. Not only is the descent of quali- ties, moral and physical, assumed to occur through males alone, whereas the female exercises equal in- fluence with the male in generation, but a system of intermarriage in a caste tends to the deterioration of the members of that caste, and that by the very opera- tion of the law of heredity, which is supposed to con- stitute their superiority. Kecent writers have doubted whether our present THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 227 civilisation can be more enduring than the great civilisations of the past. " Every family, every people, every race," says Eibot, "is born with a certain measure of vitality, a given amount of physi- cal and moral aptitudes which time and circumstances bring to light. The evolutionary process lasts until the family, the people, or the race has accomplished its destiny, which is brilliant for a few, remarkable for many, obscure for the greater number. As soon as their stock of vitality and aptitude is exhausted, the deterioration of the family, the people, or the race sets in and steadily augments, annihilation finally supervening, unless warded off by some external cause. In this process of decay heredity acts in- directly ; the direct cause is to be sought in climate and other physical conditions, and in the manners, customs, and institutions of the community." ^ Jacoby is equally pessimist in his views. " From the great mass of humanity," says this authority, " individuals, families, and races rise above the common level ; they laboriously climb the heights of power, riches, intelli- gence, and talent, and having gained the summit are precipitated once more into the depths. . . . Nations exhaust themselves like soil that is not manured, the ^ Ribot, L'HeHdiU Psychologiqve. 228 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY product of their genius not being returned to the common fund, but being lost to them in a material sense. Thus is explained the phenomenon known to history as the old age and decrepitude of nations. By the operation of selection and the fatal law of the extinction of privileged races, certain peoples become civilised, rise to greatness, then decline and disappear, to be supplanted by younger peoples in whom the selection of talents and energies is barely begun. ... In lowering all who lift themselves above the common level of humanity, in chastising the proud, and avenging the excess of their happiness, Nature makes the privileged classes their own executioners. Too much prosperity offends the gods, said the ancients ; and a medical study of the results of all social and intellectual distinction, and selection gener- ally, has led us to the same conclusion." ^ The true moral to be drawn from the passages above quoted is the danger of metaphor in discussing a scientific subject. These laboured comparisons of the race with the individual we believe to be wholly misleading. Nations, it is true, have risen and fallen, civilisations have grown up and declined ; and in the European communities of the present day causes of ^ Jacoby's Etudes sur la Selection. THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 229 deterioration are at work which if unchecked would probably bring upon us the fate that overtook the Greeks and the Assyrians. While improving our methods of sanitation, we carefully rescue from the fate that would await them in a ruder society the weak, the vicious, and generally the unfit, and, thanks to our philanthropy, they are enabled to throw their defects into general circulation. Hurtful to the general interest also is our indiscriminate worship of wealth, with the many unsuitable marriages it entails. Finally, class selection, upon the evils of which Jacoby so justly insists, and which prevails in the commercial as well as in the upper classes — in every form of social cHquism, in fact — is a constant and fruitful source of social degeneration. But if evolution means anything at all, it means that Nature does not move in a vicious circle, but, with many halts, much harking back, many false steps, perhaps, keeps in the main advancing. We cannot fairly judge of her progress within the paltry two thousand years covered by authentic history. It takes an in- finitely longer period to work the simplest figure in the warp and woof of existence. In the great web of life, which the Erdgeist of Goethe is ever weaving, there are many broken threads, many imperfect designs. 230 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY But we can at length perceive something of its general pattern; nay, to adopt the vigorous simile of Pro- fessor Tyndall, we can even catch glimpses of the flying shuttle. The decay of the peoples and civili- sations of the past was due to causes which we are now beginning to understand, and our growing know- ledge upon that point, together with the remedies it may enable us to adopt, is in itself to be regarded, perhaps, as a feature of evolution. Speculation is still free to deal as it pleases with those wider questions. What are we ? and Whither do we tend ? " Here we drift," says Emerson, " like white sail across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea ; but from what port did we sail ? Who knows ? Or to what port are we bound ? Who knows ? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal or floated to us some letter in a bottle from afar. But what know they more than we ? They also found themselves on this wondrous sea. No ; from the older sailors nothing. Over all their speaking trumpets the gray sea and the loud winds answer — Not in us ; not in Time." At the risk of spoiling this beautiful figure we would add, THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 281 for the sake of enforcing the truth we have sought to expound, that whatever our destination as mariners may be, we may at least advantageously learn some- thing of the principles of navigation. By that means we shall avoid being helplessly driven to and fro by adverse currents, and more speedily gain the brighter latitudes that lie ahead. THE END I 1 r^ THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE -___ STAMPED BELOW. c:97^ ^ f -^ H^'TSiM Usrrr. fJifl^fF5FF^ Series 9482 3 1205 00177 9576 UC SOUTHFRN RFGIONAl I IBRARY rAfli ITY AA 000 588 245 i