194

A SONG OF PASSAGE.

Let us jump on our horses and off and away.

The sunshine streams from the clear blue sky;

The Pampas grass shakes as we gallop by,

And the jackals hide in the jungle grass,

As the thundering hoofs of our horses pass.

The mild-eyed buffaloes sleepily stare As we cleave, like an arrow, the rushing air.

(Had they seen such lunatics anywhere?)

Lunatics? Lunatics? Well, who knows? Though man proposes, the Gods dis

pose.

Moon,

To say anything new upon a problem which has been keenly discussed ever since the Garden of Eden was invented would appear hopeless. Yet the subject is one which never loses its interest, and while its discussion began with the appearance of vertebrates upon this mud ball it will probably continue until the day of judgment. We must discuss it whether we like it or not, in sheer self-defence. If we refuse to wrestle with it, it will take vengeance upon us.

My contentions are, briefly:

1. That marriage is essentially neither a religious nor a civil institution, but a purely biologic one.

2. That marriage consists in the union of the sexes for such a term, and under such conditions, as will result in the production of the maximum number of offspring capable of surviving, in each particular species, climate, and grade of civilization.

3. That marriage is therefore to be regarded neither from the point of view of the male, nor from that of the female, but solely from that of the

race.

4. The duration of marriage is usually determined by the length of time during which the offspring require the care and protection of both parents in order to properly equip them for the struggle of life.

5. Monogamous marriage, lasting for life, is the highest type as yet evolved, and has survived all other forms and become that adopted by every dominant race, on account of its resulting in the largest number of most efficient offspring.

The proof of the first proposition is readily furnished. Marriage is obviously not a creature of either Church or State, for the very soundest of rea

sons, that it far antedates them both. Instead of being a creature of either of these institutions, it created them both, and is infinitely older and more fundamental than either. Both the decalogue and the common law simply recognize and regulate it. The only reason why we imagine that it is either the State or the Church which gives sanction to marriage, is that our memories are so short and our historical knowledge is so exceedingly limited.

The law, as a rule, has been comparatively rational and content to leave the institution as it found it, or to modify it in accordance with the changing requirements of the race. In every country in the world the mere standing up together of a man and a woman of adult age, and publicly alleging that they propose to take each other as husband and wife, is considered adequate and legally binding. Open and continued living together as man and wife is sufficient for "common law" marriage.

Not so, however, with the Church. When she first appropriated it, marriage was a perfectly rational and even attractive institution. She has done

her best ever since to render it irrational and intolerable. While she deserves great credit for her steadfast insistence upon the "sanctity" of the marriage vow under all circumstances, her supreme contempt for reason has led her to insist upon the irrevocability of the bond to a degree which has been most disastrous, both to morals and to happiness. Her contention that marriage should usually be for life is entirely rational, in accordance with the teachings of biology, and has exercised an admirable influence, but her insistence that the tie was practically irrevocable and that divorced persons could

To say anything new upon a problem which has been keenly discussed ever since the Garden of Eden was invented would appear hopeless. Yet the subject is one which never loses its interest, and while its discussion began with the appearance of vertebrates upon this mud ball it will probably continue until the day of judgment. We must discuss it whether we like it or not, in sheer self-defence. If we refuse to wrestle with it, it will take vengeance upon us.

My contentions are, briefly:

1. That marriage is essentially neither a religious nor a civil institution, but a purely biologic one.

2. That marriage consists in the union of the sexes for such a term, and under such conditions, as will result in the production of the maximum number of offspring capable of surviving, in each particular species, climate, and grade of civilization.

3. That marriage is therefore to be regarded neither from the point of view of the male, nor from that of the female, but solely from that of the race.

4. The duration of marriage is usu ally determined by the length of time during which the offspring require the care and protection of both parents in order to properly equip them for the struggle of life.

5. Monogamous marriage, lasting for life, is the highest type as yet evolved, and has survived all other forms and become that adopted by every dominant race, on account of its resulting in the largest number of most efficient offspring.

The proof of the first proposition is readily furnished. Marriage is obviously not a creature of either Church or State, for the very soundest of rea

sons, that it far antedates them both. Instead of being a creature of either of these institutions, it created them both, and is infinitely older and more fundamental than either. Both the decalogue and the common law simply recognize and regulate it. The only reason why we imagine that it is either the State or the Church which gives sanction to marriage, is that our memories are so short and our historical knowledge is so exceedingly limited.

The law, as a rule, has been comparatively rational and content to leave the institution as it found it, or to modify it in accordance with the changing requirements of the race. In every country in the world the mere standing up together of a man and a woman of adult age, and publicly alleging that they propose to take each other as husband and wife, is considered adequate and legally binding. Open and continued living together as man and wife is sufficient for "common law" marriage.

Not so, however, with the Church. When she first appropriated it, marriage was a perfectly rational and even attractive institution. She has done

her best ever since to render it irrational and intolerable. While she deserves great credit for her steadfast insistence upon the "sanctity" of the marriage vow under all circumstances, her supreme contempt for reason has led her to insist upon the irrevocability of the bond to a degree which has been most disastrous, both to morals and to happiness. Her contention that marriage should usually be for life is entirely rational, in accordance with the teachings of biology, and has exercised an admirable influence, but her insistence that the tie was practically irrevocable and that divorced persons could

never re-marry was simply absurd, and its effects have been even worse than its logic.

Institutions and morals are the result of experience, and are both rational and plastic, like everything else that is alive; the moment the law, or the Church, crystallizes them fossilization sets in. Not only is it one of the commonest and most elementary facts of anthropologic knowledge that the institution of marriage far antedated either the law or the Churchcertainly any form of the Church which modern ecclesiasticism will for a moment admit its descent from-but it also exists in a realm in which no trace whatever of religion has yet been discovered by even the most enthusiastic of the orthodox, and that is the higher vertebrates below man. I believe that this fact has not been given the weight which it deserves in discussing the origin and sanctions of human marriage.

Not only is the bare fact of marriage or sexual union present in all and every species, but in all the higher and many even of the intermediate forms a definite term is fixed for the union, with rights possessed by both parties under it and penalties for its violation. Moreover, every form of conjugal union which the ingenuity of man has been able to devise can be found to exist in full perfection among the lower animals. From promiscuity, through union simply for the mating season, to polygamy, polyandry, and finally monogamy and monandry, every possible phase and form of the institution can be studied outside the human species, as I have shown in a previous paper. The same results appear to have been reached by experience there as in our own species, namely, that, in proportion as the species rise in the scale of aggressiveness

1 Animal Marriage, The Living Age, Dec. 31, 1904.

and intelligence, promiscuity, or mere mating-season union, tends to disappear and a lasting type of polygamy or, as in an overwhelming majority, a fairly well settled form of monogamy, in many cases even lasting for life, is reached.

In my judgment a grave oversight has usually been committed by even pure anthropologists and sociologists, when discussing this question, in ignoring the generations of pre-human experience and experiment upon this very point, the results of which are possessed by even the lowest savage. It seems to have been taken for granted with astonishing naïveté that primitive man began with a perfectly clean slate and an unbiassed mind. Naturally therefore-and this error has been particularly glaring and ridiculous in the case of pseudo-scientists of the Lombroso type-it was assumed that primitive man and primitive woman, having so to speak just caught sight of one another for the first time, "Garden of Eden" fashion, promptly proceeded to live in a condition of unrestrained promiscuity in marital affairs; whence sprang the unfounded assumption of even investigators like McLennan, Morgan and others, that promiscuity was the earliest form of the marriage relation, from which all others must necessarily be derived. Their theory made the earlier theories of marriage and its derivation a labyrinth of hopeless confusion. The facts, as collected, simply would not fit in with this hastily assumed and unfounded premise. The only adequate and rational way to approach the origins of marriage in the human species is to consider man, to begin with, as on the level of the highest type of mammals -his close cousins-and as starting from that point. When this is once done, and primitive man is compared with the anthropoid apes, even the monkeys, it becomes apparent at once