I: WAR [1903]

We have heard our political leaders say from time to time that “War is necessary,” “War is a good thing.” They were trying to establish a major premise which would suggest the conclusion, “Therefore let us have a little war now,” or “It is wise, on general principles, to have a war once in a while.” That argument may be taken as the text of the present essay. It has seemed to me worth while to show from the history of civilization just what war has done and has not done for the welfare of mankind.

In the eighteenth century it was assumed that the primitive state of mankind was one of Arcadian peace, joy, and contentment. In the nineteenth century the assumption went over to the other extreme — that the primitive state was one of universal warfare. This, like the former notion, is a great exaggeration. Man in the most primitive and uncivilized state known to us does not practice war all the time; he dreads it; he might rather be described as a peaceful animal. Real warfare comes with the collisions of more developed societies.

If we turn to facts about the least civilized men we find proofs that they are not warlike and do not practice war if they can help it. The Australians have no idea

of conquest or battle. Their fights do not lead to slaughter or spoils or other consequences of victory. 1 Sometimes a fight takes the form of a friendly trial of skill with weapons between two parties who, one by one, cast their weapons at each other. Quarrels between tribes are sometimes settled by a single combat between chiefs. “Real fighting rarely takes place unless the women arouse the men,” and even then it is only carried on by taunts and wrestling. “The first wound ends the combat.” It is often followed by a war of words, hair-pulling, and blows with yam-sticks between the women. 2 The Australians have no war because they have no property that is worth pillaging; no tribe has anything to tempt the cupidity of another. They have no political organization, so there can be no war for power. 3 Each group appropriates hunting grounds, and over these war arises only with the increase of population. An Englishman who knew them well said that he knew of serious wounds, but he had known of but one death from their affrays. 4

Neither are the Papuans of New Guinea warlike in all parts of the island. Like other men on the same grade of civilization, they may be assassins, but they are not warriors, and ff two bodies of them meet in hostility, we are told that “there is a remarkably small death-roll at the end of the battle.” 5 Of another group of them we are told that they have no offensive weapons at all, but live without disturbance from neighbors and without care for the future. 6 Their children rarely quarrel at play, and if they do, it ends in words. We are told that they lack the courage, temper, and concentration of will which would be necessary for a good schoolboy fight. Perhaps the converse would be true: they have no schoolboy fights and therefore have no courage, temper, and concentration of will. We are not astonished to hear that they develop excessive tyranny and cruelty to those who are weaker than themselves, especially to women, and even to their mothers. 1 These people are excessively distrustful of each other and villages but a little distance apart have very little intercourse. This is attributed in great part to head-hunting and cannibalism. In general they know the limits of their own territory and observe them, but they quarrel about women. 2 The people in German Melanesia are of the same kind; they are cowardly and mean, make raids on each other's land to destroy and plunder, when they think they can do it safely, but they will not join battle, 3 On some of the small islands war is entirely unknown. 4

The Chatham Islanders sometimes quarreled over booty won in pursuing seals or whales, but they had a law that the first drop of blood ended the fight. 5 The Khonds in Madras became insubordinate a few years ago and a police force was sent against them; they prepared stones to roll down the hill in front of their village, but left the rear unguarded, and when the police entered by the rear the Khonds protested against the unfairness of this movement after they had taken such precautions in front.
The Rengmahs on the Assam hills attach to the body a tail of wood eighteen inches long, curved upwards, which they use to wag defiance at an enemy. 1 Such people evidently could never have had much experience of war. The Mrú on the Chittagong hills are peaceable, timid, and simple; in a quarrel they do not fight, but call in an exorcist to take the sense of the spirits on the matter. 2

Livingstone says that the tribes in the interior of South Africa, where no slave trade existed, seldom had any war except about cattle, and some tribes refused to keep cattle in order not to offer temptation. In one case only had he heard of war for any other reason; three brothers, Barolongs, fought over one woman, and their tribe had remained divided, up to the time of writing, into three parties. During his residence in the Bechuana country he never saw unarmed men strike each other. They quarrel with words, but generally both parties burst into a laugh and that ends it. 3 By an exception among the Canary islanders, the people of Hierro knew no war and had no weapons, although their long leaping-poles could be used as such when occasion demanded.

A Spanish priest, writing an account, in 1739, of the Aurohuacos of Colombia, 5 says that they have no weapons of offense or defense. If two quarrel they go out to a big rock or tree and each with his staff beats the rock or tree with vituperations. The one whose staff breaks first is the victor; then they embrace and return home as friends. Even our American Indians, who appear in our legends to be so bloodthirsty and warlike, always appreciated the blessings of peace. Wampum strings and belts were associated with peace-pacts and with prayers for peace.

In contrast with these cases we find others of extreme warlikeness which account for the current idea that primitive men love war and practice it all the time. But if we examine the cases of peacefulness or unwarlike-hess which have been cited, we see that only two or three seem to present evidence of Arcadian peace and simplicity, such as, in the imagination of the eighteenth century philosophers, characterized men in a state of nature. Probably if we had fuller knowledge these few instances would be much modified. What we see is that men have always quarreled. The cases which have been selected are some of them also those of people who have been defeated, broken, and cowed down. Another set of examples consists of those in which abstinence from war is due to cowardice, and with it go the vices of cowardice — tyranny and cruelty to the weak. These cases are calculated to delight the hearts of the advocates of strenuosity. What our testimonies have in common is this: they show that we cannot postulate a warlike character or a habit of fighting as a universal or even characteristic trait of primitive man.

When we undertake to talk about primitive society we should conceive of it as consisting of petty groups scattered separately over a great territory. I speak of groups because I want a term of the widest significance. The group may consist, as it does amongst Australians and Bushmen, of a man with one or possibly two wives and their children, or it may have a few more members, or it may be a village group as in New Guinea, or a tribe or part of a tribe as amongst our own Indians. It is to be observed that this ultimate unit is a group and not an individual. Every individual excludes every other in the competition of life unless they can by combining together win more out of nature by joint effort than the sum of what they could win separately. This combination is what makes groups and brings about industrial organization. When a man and woman unite in the most elementary group known, they do it for economic reasons, because they can carry on the struggle for existence better together than apart. In time this turns into a kin-group, united “by blood.” This remains undivided as long as its organization gives advantages, but breaks up when it grows too big for the existing economic system. As soon as it breaks, the fractions begin to compete with each other. If by greater culture a higher organization becomes possible, two groups coalesce by intermarriage or conquest, competition gives way to combination again, and the bigger unit enters into competition with other composite units. Thus at all stages throughout the history of civilization competition and combination forever alternate with each other.

These groups are independent of each other, their size being determined by their mode of life, because the number who can live together economically is limited by the possibilities of the food-quest. When a group outgrows this limit, it breaks up and scatters. The fact of former association is long remembered and there is a bond of kinship and alliance which may at times draw former associates together again for festivals and religious observances, but after they separate the tendency is to become entirely independent and to fall under the type just described; viz. , scattered groups each with its individuality, yet in a certain neighborhood to each other. Their remoter relationship does not keep them from quarreling and fighting. In the book of Judges 1 we see cases of war between tribes of Israel in spite of the higher bond which united them with each other and separated them from the Gentiles.

All the members of one group are comrades to each other, and have a common interest against every other group. If we assume a standpoint in one group we may call that one the “we-group” or the “in-group”; then every other group is to us an “others-group” or an “out-group.” The sentiment which prevails inside the “we-group,” between its members, is that of peace and cooperation; the sentiment which prevails inside of a group towards all outsiders is that of hostility and war. These two sentiments are perfectly consistent with each other; in fact, they necessarily complement each other. Let us see why that is so.

War arises from the competition of life, not from the struggle for existence. In the struggle for existence a man is wrestling with nature to extort from her the means of subsistence. It is when two men are striving side by side in the struggle for existence, to extort from nature the supplies they need, that they come into rivalry and a collision of interest with each other takes place. This collision may be light and unimportant, if the supplies are large and the number of men small, or it may be harsh and violent, if there are many men striving for a small supply. This collision we call the competition of life. Of course men are in the competition of life with beasts, reptiles, insects, and plants — in short, with all organic forms; we will, however, confine our attention to men. The greater or less intensity of the competition of life is a fundamental condition of human existence, and the competition arises between those ultimate unit groups which I have described. The members of the unit group work together. The Australian or Bushman hunter goes abroad to seek meat food, while the woman stays by the fire at a trysting place, with the children, and collects plant food. They cooperate in the struggle for existence, and the size of the group is fixed by the number who can work together to the greatest advantage under their mode of life. Such a group, therefore, has a common interest. It must have control of a certain area of land; hence it comes into collision of interest with every other group. The competition of life, therefore, arises between groups, not between individuals, and we see that the members of the in-group are allies and joint-partners in one interest while they are brought into antagonism of interest with all outsiders. It is the competition of life, therefore, which makes war, and that is why war always has existed and always will. It is in the conditions of human existence. In the cases which have been cited of nature peoples who have no war, we have heard mention already of division of hunting grounds and of quarrels which arise about them. Wherever there is no war, there we find that there is no crowding, as among the scattered Eskimo, or that, after long fighting, treaties and agreements have been made to cover all relations of interest between the groups. These we call peace-pacts, and it is evident that they consist in conventional agreements creating some combination between the groups which are parties to the agreement.

Each group must regard every other as a possible enemy on account of the antagonism of interests, and so it views every other group with suspicion and distrust, although actual hostilities occur only on specific occasion. Every member of another group is a stranger; he may be admitted as a guest, in which case rights and security are granted him, but if not so admitted he is an enemy. We can now see why the sentiments of peace and cooperation inside are complementary to sentiments of hostility outside. It is because any group, in order to be strong against an outside enemy, must be well disciplined, harmonious, and peaceful inside; in other words, because discord inside would cause defeat in battle with another group. Therefore the same conditions which made men warlike against outsiders made them yield to the control of chiefs, submit to discipline, obey law, cultivate peace, and create institutions inside. The notion of rights grows up in the in-group from the usages established there securing peace. There was a double education, at the same time, out of the same facts and relations. It is no paradox at all to say “hat peace makes war and that war makes peace. There are two codes of morals and two sets of mores, one for comrades inside and the other for strangers outside, and they arise from the same interests. Against outsiders it was meritorious to kill, plunder, practice blood revenge, and to steal women and slaves; but inside none of these things could be allowed because they would produce discord and weakness. Hence, in the in-group, law (under the forms of custom and taboo) and institutions had to take the place of force. Every group was a peace-group inside and the peace was sanctioned by the ghosts of the ancestors who had handed down the customs and taboos. Against outsiders religion sanctioned and encouraged war; for the ghosts of the ancestors, or the gods, would rejoice to see their posterity and worshipers once more defeat, slay, plunder, and enslave the ancient enemy.

The Eskimos of Bering Strait think it wrong to steal from people in the same village or tribe; a thief is publicly reproached and forced to return the thing stolen. But to steal from an outsider is not wrong unless it brings harm on one's own tribe. 1 Strabo 2 says of the Scythians that they were just and kind to each other, but very savage towards all outsiders. The sentiment of cohesion, internal comradeship, and devotion to the in-group, which carries with it a sense of superiority to any out-group and readiness to defend the interests of the in-group against the out-group, is technically known as ethnocentrism. It is really the sentiment of patriotism in all its philosophic fullness; that is, both in its rationality and in its extravagant exaggeration. The Mohaves and the Seri of southern California will have no relations of marriage or trade with any other people; they think themselves superior. The Mohaves are wild and barbarous and the Seri are on a lower grade of civilization than any other tribe in America. Therefore, we see that ethnocentrism has nothing to do with the relative grade of civilization of any people. The Seri think that “the brightest virtue is the shedding of alien blood, while the blackest crime in their calendar is alien conjugal union.” 3 Perhaps nine-tenths of all the names given by savage tribes to themselves mean “Men,” “The Only Men,” or “Men of Men”; that is, We are men, the rest are something else. A recent etymology of the word Iroquois makes it mean “I am the real man.” 4 In general Indians held that they were a favored race, due to a special creation. 5 Nansen 6 gives a letter written by an Eskimo in 1756 when he heard of the war between England and France. He burst into a rhapsody about Greenland. “Your unfruiffulness makes us happy and saves us from molestation.” The writer was surprised that the Christians had not learned better manners amongst the Eskimo, and he proposed to send missionaries to them. A traveler in Formosa says that the Formosans thought foreigners barbarians, “civilization being solely within the dominion of the Celestial Emperor. All the rest of the world — if there was any poor remainder — was benighted, and but the home of ‘barbarians,’ not ‘men.’” 1 This is the language of ethnocentrism; it may be read in the newspapers of any civilized country to-day.

We find then that there are two sentiments in the minds of the same men at the same time. These have been called militancy and industrialism. The latter term does not seem to be a good one and it is not apt until we reach high civilization; what we want is a term to express the peace sentiment in antithesis to militancy, but industrialism has obtained currency and it has this much justification, even for savage life, that, inside the group, the needs of life must be provided for by productive labor. Generally that is left to the women and the men practice militarism.

It would not be possible for neighboring groups to remain really isolated from each other. One has in its territory stone or salt, water or fuel, limited fruits, melons, nuts, fish, or perhaps other natural materials which the others need. They also take wives from each other, generally, but not always. Hence arise treaties of commercium and connubium , which bring about a middle state of things between war and peace. These treaties are the origin of international law. A comparison of modern municipal and international law will show that the difference between the relations of members of the in-group with each other, and of the groups with each other, still exists.

If now we turn back to the question with which I started, whether men began in a state of peace or a state of war, we see the answer. They began with both together. Which preponderated is a question of the intensity of the competition of life at the time. When that competition was intense, war was frequent and fierce, the weaker were exterminated or absorbed by the stronger, the internal discipline of the conquerors became stronger, chiefs got more absolute power, laws became more stringent, religious observances won greater authority, and so the whole societal system was more firmly integrated. On the other hand, when there were no close or powerful neighbors, there was little or no war, the internal organization remained lax and feeble, chiefs had little power, and a societal system scarcely existed.

The four great motives which move men to social activity are hunger, love, vanity, and fear of superior powers. If we search out the causes which have moved men to war we find them under each of these motives or interests. Men have fought for hunting grounds, for supplies which are locally limited and may be monopolized, for commerce, for slaves, and probably also for human flesh. These motives come under hunger, or the food-quest, or more widely under the economic effort to win subsistence. They have fought for and on account of women, which we must put partly under love, although the women were wanted chiefly as laborers and so, along with the slaves, would come under the former head. They have fought to win heads, or scalps, or other trophies, and for honor or dignity, or purely for glory; this comes under the operation of vanity. They have fought for blood revenge, to prevent or punish sorcery, and to please their gods; these motives belong under the fear of superior powers. It was reserved for modern civilized men to fight on account of differences of religion, and from this motive the fiercest and most persistent wars have been waged.

Is there anything grand or noble in any of these motives of war? Not a bit. But we must remember that the motives from which men act have nothing at all to do with the consequences of their action. Where will you find in history a case of a great purpose rationally adopted by a great society and carried through to the intended result and then followed by the expected consequences in the way of social advantage? You can find no such thing. Men act from immediate and interested motives like these for which they have waged war, and the consequences come out of the forces which are set loose. The consequences may be advantageous or disadvantageous to men. The story of these acts and consequences makes up human history. So it has been with war. While men were fighting for glory and greed, for revenge and superstition, they were building human society. They were acquiring discipline and cohesion; they were learning cooperation, perseverance, fortitude, and patience. Those are not savage virtues; they are products of education. War forms larger social units and produces states; of the North American Indians, those had the intensest feeling of unity who were the most warlike. 1 The Netherlands form a striking example in modern history of the weakness of a state which is internally divided; the best historian of Dutch civilization tells us that the internal disintegration was always greatest in times of truce or of peace. 2 There can be no doubt that the Germans of to-day owe their preeminence in industry and science to the fact that they are a highly disciplined nation. A Portuguese sociologist says that “War is the living fountain from which flows the entire society.” 1 If we fix our minds on the organic growth and organization of society, this assertion is not exaggerated. An American sociologist 2 says that “in spite of the countless miseries which follow in its train, war has probably been the highest stimulus to racial progress. It is the most potent excitant known to all the faculties.” The great conquests have destroyed what was effete and opened the way for what was viable. What appalls us, however, is the frightful waste of this process of evolution by war — waste of life and waste of capital. It is this waste which has made the evolution of civilization so slow.

Here, then, let us turn back and see how the peace-element develops alongside the war-element. We shall find that peace-rules and peace-institutions have been established, from the earliest civilization, even for the relations of groups with each other. House-peace is perhaps the simplest form. The nature-people very often bury a man under his own fireplace, and from this usage radiate various customs, all of which go to associate the ghosts of the dead with the hearthstone of the living. It follows that quarreling, brawling, or violence near the hearth is an insult to the ghosts. Hence arises a notion of religious sacredness about the hearth an atmosphere of peace is created, and the women who live in the house and work at the hearth profit by it. The householder has a dignity and prerogative in his house, however humble his social position may be; hence the maxim that a man's house is his castle goes back to the beginning of civilization. It may be only a wind-shelter, but the ghosts protect it; and any stranger, fugitive, suppliant, even an enemy, if admitted, comes under the house protection and hospitality while there. As the house becomes larger and better the peace-taboo extends from the fireplace to the whole house and then to the yard or enclosure. This is the house-peace.

If any group which possesses deposits of salt, flint-stone fit for implements, pipe-stone, water supply, or special foods should try to prevent others from having access to the same, all others would join in war against that one until an agreement was made and established by usage. This agreement is either one of peaceful access to natural supplies or one of trade. Tribes also agree to take wives from each other. We often have reason to be astonished at the institution-making power of nature-men when disagreeable experience has forced them to find relief. The Tubu of the Sahara are warlike and distrustful even of each other to such an extent that they scarcely form a society; even in their villages they quarrel and fight. It is a very noteworthy feature that these people have no notion of rights. It is the in-group as a peace-group which is the school of rights; as we have seen, there can be peace and order inside only by law (using this term in its broadest sense); but a law creates and enforces rights. Now these Tubu have been forced to make a law that inside the village no weapons may be worn, 1 so that here already we find an institutional arrangement to limit warlikeness. When Nachti-gal, visiting the Tubu, complained of their ill usage of himself and threatened to go away, they pointed out to him that as soon as he had left their territory he would be at their mercy. 2 This shows that even they had an idea of some rights of a guest inside their group as compared with his status outside, when he would be protected by nothing. The Beduin have the same notion. They are ruthless robbers and murderers, but a guest in the tent is perfectly safe and entitled to their best hospitality. When he leaves it he is fair game, whether enemy, friend, or neighbor. 1

The West-Australians have a usage that any man who has committed a wrong according to their code must submit to a flight of spears from all who think themselves aggrieved, or he must allow a spear to be thrust through his leg or arm. There is a tariff of wounds as penalties for all common crimes. 2 We understand that this is an in-group usage. It is a common custom in Australia that a man who has stolen a wife from an out-group must submit to a flight of spears from her group-comrades; this is now only a ceremony, but it is a peace-institution which has set aside old warfare on account of stolen women. As we have seen, the Australians live in very small groups, but they assemble from time to time in large kin-groups for purposes of festivals of a religious character. The kin-groups are not peace-groups, 3 because they are loose and have no common life. At the assemblies all the sacred objects are brought into the ceremonial ground, but on account of the danger of quarrels, no display of arms is allowed anywhere near the sacred objects. 4 Bearers of messages from one tribe to another are regarded as under a peace-taboo in eastern Australia; women are under a peace-taboo and hence are employed as ambassadors to arrange disputes between tribes. After a quarrel there is a corroboree, to make and confirm peace. 1 These usages are institutional. They are positive rules of an arbitrary character, depending upon agreement and usage, but are devised to satisfy expediency. In Queensland no fighting at all is allowed at night in camp; those who want to fight must go outside, and after a fight the victor must show to his comrades that he had a real grievance. If he does not convince them of this they force him to submit to the same mutilation from his victim that he has inflicted. The women fight with their yam-sticks, which are about four feet long. One woman allows the other to strike her on the head; the second must then submit to a blow; thus they go on until one does not want any more. 2 What we have to notice here is that the fight, inside the group, is under regulations, which fact makes it institutional. The duel is a similar ease of a conventionalized fight in the midst of a peaceful civil order. In all these cases we see that war is admitted inside of a peace-group when individuals are wronged or offended by comrades, but only in conventionalized and regulated form, so that it is a kind of lawful war.

We also find war between groups under some regulation and conventionalization when there is a bond of kinship or religion uniting the two groups. It appears that this is the origin of the rules of war by which its horrors are reduced. On the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides the eight thousand inhabitants are divided into two groups, one at each end of the island, and each group is subdivided into villages. If two villages in the same division fight, as they often do, the fighting is not intense and there is no cannibalism; but between the two big divisions there is blood revenge, and if they fight there is no limit to the ferocity, cannibalism being then practiced. 1 On the Mortlock Islands when two tribes go to war each warrior must select as his antagonist on the other side one who is not in the same kin-group with himself. 2 Amongst certain Sumatrans if a man of one village has a grievance against a man of another, the men of the former go into the fields of the other, where they are met by the local chief, who asks their errand. They answer that they have come to destroy the plantation of the man in the village who has injured a man of theirs. The chief admits that this is just, but proposes to avoid violence; so he brings to them fruit from the plantation of the offender and, if the offense was great, he allows them to destroy a certain number of trees on it. They also burn down the offender's house “ceremonially” — a little hut is built of light material on his field and with triumphant cries is set on fire by the offended party. Generally an agreement is reached, but if not, long hostilities endure between two neighboring villages. 3

The Christian states have always professed to moderate somewhat the horrors of war when they went to fighting with each other, and so we have laws of war which are good between the states agreeing to them, but not with outsiders. This makes a limited peace-group of all the states which unite now to make international law. Let us follow these peace-institutions up into higher civilization.

The Scandinavian people spread in small bodies over their territory, and these bodies often engaged in war with each other. They had a common sanctuary at Upsala at which there were annual festivals. This religious bond kept up a certain sense of national unity, which, however, has never produced national sympathy. At the festivals at Upsala peace was enforced for the time and place 1 ; disputes were settled and fairs held, and there were also feasts and conferences. The Swedes in the thirteenth century formed kin-groups which adopted rules of mutual succor and defense. 2 The dwellings of kings also came to have in so far the character of sanctuaries that peace was maintained around them. 3 The ancient Germans maintained by law and severe penalties peace for women as to person and property; the penalties for wrong to a woman varied in the laws of the different Cerman nations, but were two or three times as great as for wrongs to men. 4 The house-peace was also very fully developed in German law. 5 The Peace of God was perhaps the most remarkable ease in history of a law to establish a time-taboo against war and violence. In the tenth century the church tried to curb the robber barons and to protect merchants; the attempts were often repeated with little result, but the “Truce of God” was at last established in 1041 by the Bishop of Arles and the Abbot of Cluny, and it won some acceptance throughout France. There was to be no fighting between Wednesday evening and Monday morning; later these limits were changed, 6 No such law was ever obeyed with any precision and it never became a custom, much less an institution, but it had some influence. As the kings gained real power and prestige in the feudal states they made the king's peace a great reality; it went with the development of the modern state. The king's peace was a name for a central civil authority which could put down all private war and violations of public order and establish a peace-group over a great extent of territory, within which rights, law, and civil authority should be secured by competent tribunals. In the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation the public general peace of the empire was introduced in 1495, but the emperors never had the means to enforce it, and it did not exist until 1873. We can see how the king's peace grew by the following case: Canute the Dane made a law in England that, if any unknown man was found dead, he should be assumed to be a Dane and a special tax, called murdrum , should be paid for him to the king. William the Conqueror followed this example, only the unknown man was assumed to be a Norman; if it could be proved that he was an Englishman (“proving his Englishry”) then the murderer or the hundred had nothing to pay to the king but only the legal compensation to the family of the deceased, if he had one. 1 This means that the king first extended his peace over his own countrymen by a special penalty on the murder of one of them, while Englishmen were left only under the old law of compensation for blood revenge; but in time equal protection was extended to all his subjects. Again, at the time of the Conquest all crimes committed on the roads which ran through a city (Canterbury, for instance) were crimes against the king's peace—which also extended one league, three perches, and three feet beyond the city gate. This means that the high roads which ran through a town were first brought under the king's peace, and this peace also extended beyond the royal burgh for an extent which was measured with droll accuracy. What was a crime elsewhere was a greater crime there, and what was not a crime elsewhere might be a crime there. King Edmund forbade blood revenge in his burgh 1 ; that is, he delimited an in-group in which there must be law and an administration of justice by his tribunal; Jews and merchants bought the protection of the king's peace throughout his realm. From this germ grew up the state as a peace-group and the king's peace as the law of the land; we Americans call it the peace of the people.

One of the most remarkable examples of a peace-group which could be mentioned is the League of the Iroquois which was formed in the sixteenth century; it deserves to be classed here with the peace-institutions of civilized states. This league was a confederation of five, afterwards six tribes of Indians, to maintain peace. By Indian usage blood revenge was a duty; but the Iroquois confederation put a stop to this, as between its members, by substituting laws and civil authority. It was, for its stage, fully as marvelous a production of statesmanship as are these United States — themselves a great peace-confederation. Compared with Algonkins and Sioux the Iroquois were an industrial society. They tried to force others to join the confederacy — that is, to come into the peace-pact or to make an alliance with it; if they would do neither, war arose and the outside people was either exterminated or absorbed. 2 Hiawatha was the culture-hero to whom the formation of the league was attributed The constitution was held in memory by strings of wampum, and at annual festivals there were confessions and exhortations. The duties inculcated were those of a warrior towards outsiders and of tribal brotherhood towards insiders. “The duty of living in harmony and peace, of avoiding evil-speaking, of kindness to the orphan, of charity to the needy and of hospitality to all, would be among the prominent topics brought under consideration” at the annual assemblies. 1

We have now found a peace of the house, of the sanctuary, of religion, of the market, of women, of the popular assembly, and of the king, all of which were legal and institutional checks upon wax and an introduction of rational and moral methods in the place of force. Let us see next what has been the relation between religion on the one side and peace or war on the other.

Those who perform the rites of worship towards the same ancestors or the same gods come into the same cult-group, but no religion has ever succeeded in making its cult-group into a peace-group, although they all try to do it. The salutation of members of a cult-group to each other is very generally “Peace,” or something equivalent. Quakers call themselves “Friends” and always have a closer bond to each other than to the outside world. Such a peace-group is only an ideal for all who profess the same religion; in most of the great religions down to the seventeenth century, dissenters or heretics were always treated with great severity, because it was thought that they would bring down the wrath of the ghost or the god not only on themselves but also on the whole community. The New England Puritarm had this notion that the sins of some would bring down the wrath of God on the whole. Religion has always intensified ethnocentrism; the adherents of a religion always think themselves the chosen people or else they think that their god is superior to all others, which amounts to the same thing. The Jews looked down upon all non-Jews as Gentiles; the Mohammedans despise all infidels — their attitude towards non-Mussulmans is one leading to aggression, plunder, and annihilation. The Greeks looked doom on all non-Greeks as barbarians, but in their case the sentiment was only partly religious; they themselves were never united by their own religion. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Mohammedanism threatened to overwhelm Christendom, Latin Christians were inflamed with greater rage against Greek Christians than against Mohammedans. Nicholas V in 1452 gave to Alfonso V of Portugal authority to subjugate any non-Christians, having in view especially people of the west coast of Africa, and to reduce them to servitude ( illorum personas in servitutem ), which probably did not mean slavery, but subjection. 1 The Spaniards and Portuguese of the sixteenth century treated all aborigines with ruthlessness because the aborigines were outside of Christianity and entitled to no rights or consideration. When the American colonies revolted, the English were amazed that the colonists could ally themselves with Frenchmen against the mother-country, although the French were Roman Catholics in religion, absolutists in the state, and of an alien nationality. Buddhism is characterized by a pervading peacefulness, but no religion has ever kept its adherents from fighting each other. The instances which have been cited suffice to show that religion has been quite as much a stimulus to war as to peace; and religious wars are proverbial for ruthlessness and ferocity.

Christianity has always contained an ideal of itself as a peace-group. The mediseval church tried to unite all Christendom into a cult- and peace-group which should reach over all the disintegration and war of the feudal period. This was the sense of mediœval Catholicity. Churches, convents, and ecclesiastical persons were put under a peace-taboo. The church, however, at the same time, entered into an alliance with the feudal nobles and adopted militant methods; heretics were dealt with as outside the fold. The modem state, as it began to take definite form, entered into a contest with the church for the control of society and for the guardianship of peace, because the church had failed to secure peace.

The United States presents us a case quite by itself. We have here a confederated state which is a grand peace-group. It occupies the heart of a continent; therefore there can be no question of balance of power here and no need of war preparations such as now impoverish Europe. The United States is a new country with a sparse population and no strong neighbors. Such a state will be a democracy and a republic, and it will be “free” in almost any sense that its people choose. If this state becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable in themselves and are worth going after. On their own continent they need never encounter war on their path of industrial and political development up to any standard which they choose to adopt. It is a very remarkable fact, and one which has had immense influence on the history of civilization, that the land of the globe is divided into two great sections, the mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa on the one side and these two Americas on the other, and that one of these worlds remained unknown to the other until only four hundred years ago. We talk a great deal about progress and modem enlightenment and democracy and the happiness of the masses, but very few people seem to know to what a great extent all those things are consequences of the discovery of the new world. As to this matter of war which we are now considering, the fact that the new world is removed to such a distance from the old world made it possible for men to make a new start here. It was possible to break old traditions, to revise institutions, and to think out a new philosophy to fit an infant society, at the same time that whatever there was in the inheritance from the old world which seemed good and available might be kept. It was a marvelous opportunity; to the student of history and human institutions it seems incredible that it ever could have been offered. The men who founded this republic recognized that opportunity and tried to use it. It is we who are now here who have thrown it away; we have decided that instead of working out the advantages of it by peace, simplicity, domestic happiness, industry and thrift, we would rather do it in the old way by war and glory, alternate victory and calamity, adventurous enterprises, grand finance, powerful government, and great social contrasts of splendor and misery. Future ages will look back to us with amazement and reproach that we should have made such a choice in the face of such an opportunity and should have entailed on them the consequences — for the opportunity will never come again.

Some illustration of our subject has, however, been furnished by the internal history of our peace-group. The aborigines of this continent have never been taken into our peace-bond, and our law about them is, consequently, full of inconsistencies. Sometimes they have been treated as comrades in the in-group; sometimes as an out-group with which our group was on a footing of hostility. Another question seems to be arising with respect to the negroes; we have been trying, since the Civil War, to absorb them into our peace-bond, but we have not succeeded. They are in it and not of it now, as much as, or more than, in the days of slavery, for the two races live more independently of each other now than they did in those former days. The Southern States do not constitute true societies because they lack unity of interest and sentiment, on account of the race difference which divides them. This discord may prove worse and more fatal to the internal integrity of the peace-group than such old antagonisms of interest as disturb Ireland, the national antagonisms which agitate Austria-Hungary, or the religious antagonisms which distract Belgium. In short, a state needs to be a true peace-group in which there is sufficient concord and sympathy to overcome the antagonisms of nationality, race, class, etc., and in which are maintained institutions adequate to adjust interests and control passions. Before even the great civilized states have reached this model, there is yet much to be done.

If we look at these facts about peace-laws and institutions and the formation of peace-groups in connection with the facts previously presented about the causes of war and the taste for war, we see that militancy and peacefulness have existed side by side in human society from the beginning just as they exist now. A peaceful society must be industrial because it must produce instead of plundering; it is for this reason that the industrial type of society is the opposite of the militant type. In any state on the continent of Europe to-day these two types of societal organization may be seen interwoven with each other and fighting each other. Industrialism builds up; militancy wastes. If a railroad is built, trade and intercourse indicate a line on which it ought to run; military strategy, however, overrules this and requires that it run otherwise. Then all the interests of trade and intercourse must be subjected to constant delay and expense because the line does not conform to them. Not a discovery or invention is made but the war and navy bureaus of all the great nations seize it to see what use can be made of it in war. It is evident that men love war; when two hundred thousand men in the United States volunteer in a month for a war with Spain which appeals to no sense of wrong against their country, and to no other strong sentiment of human nature, when their lives are by no means monotonous or destitute of interest, and where life offers chances of wealth and prosperity, the pure love of adventure and war must be strong in our population. Europeans who have to do military service have no such enthusiasm for war as war. The presence of such a sentiment in the midst of the most purely industrial state in the world is a wonderful phenomenon. At the same time the social philosophy of the modern civilized world is saturated with humanitarianism and flabby sentimentalism. The humanitarianism is in the literature; by it the reading public is led to suppose that the world is advancing along some line which they call “progress” towards peace and brotherly love. Nothing could be more mistaken. We read of fist-law and constant war in the Middle Ages and think that life must have been full of conflicts and bloodshed then; but modern warfare bears down on the whole population with a frightful weight through all the years of peace. Never, from the day of barbarism down to our own time, has every man in a society been a soldier until now; and the armaments of to-day are immensely more costly than ever before. There is only one limit possible to the war preparations of a modern European state; that is, the last man and the last dollar it can control. What will come of the mixture of sentimental social philosophy and warlike policy? There is only one thing rationally to be expected, and that is a frightful effusion of blood in revolution and war during the century now opening.

It is said that there are important offsets to all the burden and harm of this exaggerated militancy. That is true. Institutions and customs in human society are never either all good or all bad. We cannot adopt either peacefulness or warlikeness as a sole true philosophy. Military discipline educates; military interest awakens all the powers of men, so that they are eager to win and their ingenuity is quickened to invent new and better weapons. In history the military inventions have led the way and have been afterwards applied to industry. Chemical inventions were made in the attempt to produce combinations which would be destructive in war; we owe some of our most useful substances to discoveries which were made in this effort. The skill of artisans has been developed in making weapons, and then that skill has been available for industry. The only big machines which the ancients ever made were battering-rams, catapults, and other engines of war. The construction of these things familiarized men with mechanical devices which were capable of universal application. Gunpowder was discovered in the attempt to rediscover Greek fire; it was a grand invention in military art but we should never have had our canals, railroads, and other great works without such explosives. Again, we are indebted to the chemical experiments in search of military agents for our friction matches.

War also develops societal organization; it produces political institutions and classes. In the past these institutions and classes have been attended by oppression and by the exploitation of man by man; nevertheless, the more highly organized society has produced gains for all its members, including the oppressed or their posterity. The social exploitation is not essential to the organization, and it may be prevented by better provisions. In long periods of peace the whole societal structure becomes fixed in its adjustments and the functions all run into routine. Vested interests get an established control; some classes secure privileges and establish precedents, while other classes form habits of acquiescence. Traditions acquire a sacred character and philosophical doctrines are taught in churches and schools which make existing customs seem to be the “eternal order of nature.” It becomes impossible to find a standing-ground from which to attack abuses and organize reform. Such was the case in France in the eighteenth century. By war new social powers break their way and create a new order. The studentis tempted to think that even a great social convulsion is worth all it costs. What other force could break the bonds and open the way? But that is not the correct inference, because war and revolution never produee what is wanted, but only some mixture of the old evils with new ones; what is wanted is a peaceful and rational solution of problems and situations—but that requires great statesmanship and great popular sense and virtue. In the past the work has been done by war and revolution, with haphazard results and great attendant evils. To take an example from our own history: the banking and currency system of the United States, in 1860, was at a deadlock; we owe the national bank system, which was a grand reform of currency and banking, to the Civil War. It is impossible to see how else we could have overcome the vested interests and could have extricated ourselves from our position. It was no purpose of the war to reform the currency, but it gave an incidental opportunity and we had to win from it what we could.

There is another effect of war which is less obvious but more important. During a period of peace, rest, and routine, powers are developed which are in reality societal variations, among which a certain societal selection should take place. Here comes in the immense benefit of real liberty, because, if there is real liberty, a natural selection results; but if there is social prejudice, monopoly, privilege, orthodoxy, tradition, popular delusion, or any other restraint on liberty, selection does not occur. War operates a rude and imperfect selection. Our Civil War may serve as an example; think of the public men who were set aside by it and of the others who were brought forward by it, and compare them in character and ideas. Think of the doctrines which were set aside as false, and of the others which were established as true; also of the constitutional principles which were permanently stamped as heretical or orthodox. As a simple example, compare the position and authority of the president of the United States as it was before and as it has been since the Civil War. The Germans tell of the ruthless and cruel acts of Napoleon in Germany, and all that they say is true; but he did greater services to Germany than any other man who can be mentioned. He tore down the relics of mediœvalism and set the powers of the nation to some extent free from the fetters of tradition; we do not see what else could have done it. It took another war in 1870 to root out the traditional institutions and make way for the new ones. Of course the whole national life responded to this selection. The Roman state was a selfish and pitiless subjugation of all the rest of mankind. It was built on slavery, it cost inconceivable blood and tears, and it was a grand system of extortion and plunder, but it gave security and peace under which the productive powers of the provinces expanded and grew. The Roman state gave discipline and organization and it devised institutions; the modern world has inherited societal elements from it which are invaluable. One of the silliest enthusiasms which ever got control of the minds of a great body of men was the Crusades, but the Crusades initiated a breaking up of the stagnation of the Dark Ages and an emancipation of the social forces of Europe. They exerted a selective effect to destroy what was barbaric and deadening and to foster what had new hope in it by furnishing a stimulus to thought and knowledge.

A society needs to have a ferment in it; sometimes an enthusiastic delusion or an adventurous folly answers the purpose. In the modern world the ferment is furnished by economic opportunity and hope of luxury. In other ages it has often been furnished by war. Therefore some social philosophers have maintained that the best course of human affairs is an alternation of peace and war. 1 Some of them also argue that the only unity of the human race which can ever come about must be realized from the survival of the fittest in a war of weapons, ih a conflict of usages, and in a rivalry issuing in adaptability to the industrial organization. It is not probable that aborigines will ever in the future be massacred in masses, as they have been in the past, but the case is even worse when, like our Indians for instance, they are set before a fatal dilemma. They cannot any longer live in their old way; they must learn to live by unskilled labor or by the mechanic arts. This, then, is the dilemma: to enter into the civilized industrial organization or to die out. If it had been possible for men to sit still in peace without civilization, they never would have achieved civilization; it is the iron spur of the nature-process which has forced them on, and one form of the nature-process has been the attack of some men upon others who were weaker than they.

We find, then, that in the past as a matter of fact war has played a great part in the irrational nature-process by which things have come to pass. But the nature-processes are frightful; they contain no allowance for the feelings and interests of individuals — for it is only individuals who have feelings and interests. The nature-elements never suffer and they never pity. If we are terrified at the nature-processes there is only one way to escape them; it is the way by which men have always evaded them to some extent; it is by knowledge, by rational methods, and by the arts. The facts which have been presented about the functions of war in the past are not flattering to the human reason or conscience. They seem to show that we are as much indebted for our welfare to base passion as to noble and intelligent endeavor. At the present moment things do not look much better. We talk of civilizing lower races, but we never have done it yet; we have exterminated them. Our devices for civilizing them have been as disastrous to them as our firearms. At the beginning of the twentieth century the great civilized nations are making haste, in the utmost jealousy of each other, to seize upon all the outlying parts of the globe; they are vying with each other in the construction of navies by which each may defend its share against the others. What will happen? As they are preparing for war they certainly will have war, and their methods of colonization and exploitation will destroy the aborigines. In this way the human race will be civilized — but by the extermination of the uncivilized — unless the men of the twentieth century can devise plans for dealing with aborigines which are better than any which have yet been devised. No one has yet found any way in which two races, far apart in blood and culture, can be amalgamated into one society with satisfaction to both. Plainly, in this matter which lies in the immediate future, the only alternatives to force and bloodshed are more knowledge and more reason.

Shall any statesman, therefore, ever dare to say that it would be well, at a given moment, to have a war, lest the nation fall into the vices of industrialism and the evils of peace? The answer is plainly: No! War is never a handy remedy, which can be taken up and applied by routine rule. No war which can be avoided is just to the people who have to carry it on, to say nothing of the enemy. War is Eke other evils; it must be met when it is unavoidable, and such gain as can be got from it must be won. In the forum of reason and deliberation war never can be anything but a makeshift, to be regretted; it is the task of the statesman to find rational means to the same end. A statesman who proposes war as an instrumentality admits his incompetency; a politician who makes use of war as a counter in the game of parties is a criminal.

Can peace be universal? There is no reason to believe it. It is a fallacy to suppose that by widening the peace-group more and more it can at last embrace all mankind. What happens is that, as it grows bigger, differences, discords, antagonisms, and war begin inside of it on account of the divergence of interests. Since evil passions are a part of human nature and are in all societies all the time, a part of the energy of the society is constantly spent in repressing them. If all nations should resolve to have no armed ships any more, pirates would reappear upon the ocean; the police of the seas must be maintained. We could not dispense with our militia; we have too frequent need of it now. But police defense is not war in the sense in which I have been discussing it. War, in the future will be the clash of policies of national vanity and selfishness when they cross each other's path.

If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man's own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. The reconquest of the Holy Sepulcher, “the balance of power,” “no universal dominion,” “trade follows the flag,” “he, who holds the land will hold the sea,” “the throne and the altar,” the revolution, the faith — these are the things for which men have given their lives. What are they all? Nothing but rhetoric and phantasms. Doctrines are always vague; it would ruin a doctrine to define it, because then it could be analyzed, tested, criticised, and verified; but nothing ought to be tolerated which cannot be so tested. Somebody asks you with astonishment and horror whether you do not believe in the Monroe Doctrine. You do not know whether you do or not, because you do not know what it is; but you do not dare to say that you do not, because you understand that it is one of the things which every good American is bound to believe in. Now when any doctrine arrives at that degree of authority, the name of it is a club which any demagogue may swing over you at any time and apropos of anything. In order to describe a doctrine we must have recourse to theological language. A doctrine is an article of faith. It is something which you are bound to believe, not because you have some rational grounds for believing it true, but because you belong to such and such a church or denomination. The nearest parallel to it in politics is the “reason of state.” The most frightful injustice and cruelty which has ever been perpetrated on earth has been due to the reason of state. Jesus Christ was put to death for the reason of state; Pilate said that he found no fault, in the accused, but he wanted to keep the Jews quiet and one man crucified more or less was of no consequence. None of these metaphysics ought to be tolerated in a free state. A policy in a state we can understand; for instance it was the policy of the United States at the end of the eighteenth century to get the free navigation of the Mississippi to its mouth, even at the expense of war with Spain. That policy had reason and justice in it; it was founded in our interests; it had positive form and definite scope. A doctrine is an abstract principle; it is necessarily absolute, in its scope and abstruse in its terms; it is a metaphysical assertion. It is never true, because it is absolute, and the affairs of men are all conditioned and relative. The physicists tell us now that there are phenomena which appear to present exceptions to gravitation which can be explained only by conceiving that gravitation requires time to get to work. We are convinced that perpetual motion is absolutely impossible within the world of our experiences, but it now appears that our universe taken as a whole is a case of perpetual motion.

Now, to turn back to politics, just think what an abomination in statecraft an abstract doctrine must be. Any politician or editor can, at any moment, put a new extension on it. The people acquiesce in the doctrine and applaud it because they hear the politicians and editors repeat it, and the politicians and editors repeat it because they think it is popular. So it grows. During the recent difficulty between England and Germany on one side and Venezuela on the other, some newspapers here began to promulgate a new doctrine that no country ought to be allowed to use its naval force to collect private debts. This doctrine would have given us standing-ground for interference in that quarrel. That is what it was invented for. Of course it was absurd and ridiculous, and it fell dead unnoticed, but it well showed the danger of having a doctrine lying loose about the house, and one which carries with it big consequences It may mean anything or nothing, at any moment, and no one knows how it will be. You accede to it now, within the vague limits of what you suppose it to be; therefore you will have to accede to it to-morrow when the same name is made to cover something which you never have heard or thought of. If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, the arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless, as men are powerless against delusions.

The process by which such catchwords grow is the old popular mythologizing. Your Monroe Doctrine becomes an entity, a being, a lesser kind of divinity, entitled to reverence and possessed of prestige, so that it allows of no discussion or deliberation. The President of the United States talks about the Monroe Doctrine and he tells us solemnly that it is true and sacred, whatever it is. He even undertakes to give some definition of what he means by it; but the definition which he gives binds nobody, either now or in the future, any more than what Monroe and Adams meant by it binds anybody now not to mean anything else. He says that, on account of the doctrine, whatever it may be, we must have a big navy. In this, at least, he is plainly in the right; if we have the doctrine, we shall need a big navy. The Monroe Doctrine is an exercise of authority by the United States over a controversy between two foreign states, if one of them is in America, combined with a refusal of the United States to accept any responsibility in connection with the controversy. That is a position which is sure to bring us into collision with other States, especially because it will touch their vanity, or what they call their honor — or it will touch our vanity, or what we call our honor, if we should ever find ourselves called upon to “back down” from it. Therefore it is very true that we must expect to need a big navy if we adhere to the doctrine. What can be more contrary to sound statesmanship and common sense than to put forth an abstract assertion which has no definite relation to any interest of ours now at stake, but which has in it any number of possibilities of producing complications which we cannot foresee, but which are sure to be embarrassing when they arise!

What has just been said suggests a consideration of the popular saying, “In time of peace prepare for war.” If you prepare a big army and navy and are all ready for war, it will be easy to go to war; the military and naval men will have a lot of new machines and they will be eager to see what they can do with them. There is no such thing nowadays as a state of readiness for war. It is a chimera, and the nations which pursue it are falling into an abyss of wasted energy and wealth. When the army is supplied with the latest and best rifles, someone invents a new field gun; then the artillery must be provided with that before we are ready. By the time we get the new gun, somebody has invented a new rifle and our rival nation is getting that; therefore we must have it, or one a little better. It takes two or three years and several millions to do that. In the meantime somebody proposes a more effective organization which must be introduced; signals, balloons, dogs, bicycles, and every other device and invention must be added, and men must be trained to use them all. There is no state of readiness for war; the notion calls for never-ending sacrifices. It is a fallacy. It is evident that to pursue such a notion with any idea of realizing it would absorb all the resources and activity of the state; this the great European states are now proving by experiment. A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want, peace or war, and then to get ready for what you want; for what we prepare for is what we shall get.

II: THE FAMILY AND SOCIAL CHANGE [1909]

We currently speak of the “institution” of marriage. We also use marriage instead of wedding, nuptials, or matrimony. The result is confusion. A wedding or even nuptials occur as a ceremony or festival, on a day, and as the commencement of wedlock or matrimony. Wedlock may be an institution, but a wedding is not, for a wedding lacks the duration or recurrence which belongs to an institution. It does not provide for an enduring necessity and has no apparatus for the repeated use of the same couple. Wedlock is a permanent relation between a man and a woman which is regulated and defined by the mores. It brings the pair into cooperation for the struggle for existence and the procreation and nurture of children. Wedlock therefore forms a family, and a family seems to satisfy our idea of an institution far better than marriage or matrimony. The family institution existed probably before marriage; a woman with an infant in her arms is what we see as far back as our investigations lead us. She was limited and burdened in the struggle for existence by her infant. The task of finding subsistence was as hard for her as for a man, and, in addition to this the infant was a claimant to her time and labor. Her chance of survival lay in union and cooperation with a man. Undoubtedly this gives us the real explanation of the primitive inferiority of women; they needed the help of men more than men needed theirs, and if a union was made it was made on terms under which the woman got the disadvantage.

It certainly is a great mistake to believe that the women were put down because the men were always physically stronger. In the first place the men are not always stronger; perhaps it is, as a rule, the other way. Mr. H. H. Johnston says of the Andombies on the Congo that the women, though working very hard as laborers in general, lead a happy existence; they are often stronger than the men and more finely developed, some of them having splendid figures. Parke, speaking of the Manyuema of the Arruwimi in the same region, says that they are fine animals, and the women very handsome. They are as strong as the men. In North America an Indian chief once said to Hearne, “Women were made for labor; one of them can carry, or haul, as much as two men can do.” Schellong says of the Papuans in the German protectorate of New Guinea that the women are more strongly built than the men. 1 According to Kubary, 2 a man has the right to beat his wife, but the women are so robust that a man who tries to do it may well find that he will get the worse of it. Fights between men and women are not rare in savage life, and the women prevail in a fair share of them; Holm mentions a case where a Greenland Eskimo tried to flog his wife, but she flogged him. 3 We hear of a custom in south-eastern Australia that fights between the sexes were provoked when “there were young women who were marriageable but were not mated, and when the eligible bachelors were backward. The men would kill a totem animal of the women or the women would kill a totem animal of the men. This led to a fight of the young men and young women; then, after the wounds healed they would pair off and the social deadlock would pass away.” 1 Another ease, from higher civilization, shows how the woman was weakened by considerations of another kind. Sieroshevski, a Pole, who lived for twelve years among the Yakuts, says that he knew a Yakut woman who was constantly abused by her husband, although she was industrious and good-natured. At last the European asked her why she did not fight. He assured her that she would succeed and he argued with her that if she would once give her husband a good beating he would not misuse her any more. She, however, answered that that would never do, that her husband's companions would deride him as the man whose wife beat him, and their children would be derided by the other children for the same reason. She would not do anything which would produce that consequence and would make her worse off. This case has many parallels. A characteristic incident occurred at the Black Mountain station on the Snowy River about the years 1855–56. “A number of Theddora (Ya-itma-thang) blacks had come across from Omeo and there met a woman, known to me as Old Jenny, of their tribe, who had broken their law by becoming the wife of a man to whom she stood in the tribal relationship of Najan (mother). She had been away for some years, and this was the first time that her kindred had encountered her. The wife of one of them attacked her first with a digging-stick, but she defended herself so well with the same weapon that the woman had to desist, and her husband continued the attack on Old Jenny, who had divested herself of all but one small garment. He commenced with a club, but finding he could not hit her, changed it for a curved club with which he tried to ‘peck’ her on the head over guard. After a time he also had to give it up, and they had to make friends with the invincible woman. This is an instance of the manner in which the women are able to defend themselves with their weapon, the yam-stick, being no mean opponents of a man armed only with a club.” 1

The status of woman was generally sad and pathetic in savage life, but we may accept it as an established fact that this was not because she was physically inferior to man, but was due rather to inferiority in the struggle for existence on account of maternity. In the family the man often tyrannized over the woman, and the woman came into the family unwillingly, driven by a greater necessity, but the family was not a product of force. It was a product of contract. It was controlled by the mores which soon established notions of the right way to behave and of rights and duties which would be conducive to prosperity and happiness.

In this primitive society the family became the arena in which folkways were formed and taught, traditions were handed down, myths were invented, and sympathies were cultivated. The mother and the children were in the closest association and intimacy. The instruction of example without spoken command or explanation was the chief instruction. It makes little difference whether we thihk of a family in a horde or of monaudrous family of Australians or Bushmen. The children learned from their mothers the usages which were domestic and familiar, which underlie society and are moral in their character. At puberty the boys went with their fathers into the political body and became warriors and hunters. Then they were disciplined into the life of men and left the family. They got wives and founded families, but the father, in his own family, was an outsider and a stranger with few functions and little authority.

Mohammed gave approval to the father-family, which seems to have been winning acceptance in his time. Islam is founded on the father-family. In the Koran women are divided into three classes in respect to marriage: first, wives, that is, status-wives with all the rank, honor, and rights which the name implies; second, concubines, that is, wives of an inferior class, in a permanent and recognized relation, but without the rank and honor of wives; third, slaves, whose greatest chance of happiness was to “find favor” in the eyes of their master or owner. This classification of the wives was also a classification of the mothers, and it produced jealousy and strife of the children. Only men of rank and wealth could have households of this complex character. Those of limited means had to choose which form of wife they would take. The full status-wife could make such demands that she became a great burden to her husband, and it appears that the Moslems now prefer concubines or slaves. In Mohammedan royal families the jealousies and strifes of children, where the son of a slave might be preferred and made heir by the father, have reduced kingdoms and families to bloodshed and anarchy.

In general, in the mother-family, the domestic system must have lacked integration and discipline. The Six Nations or Iroquois had the mother-family in well-developed form. Each woman with her husband and children had a room about seven feet square in the “long house.” This room was separated from others inhabited by similar families, not by a partition, but only by a pole three or four feet from the floor, over which skins were hung. Each family shared fire with another family opposite, and evidently privacy was only imperfectly secured. Any man who did not bring in what was considered his fair share of food-supply could be expelled at any time. A husband had to satisfy not only his wife, but all her female relatives if he was to be in peace and comfort. He could withdraw when he chose, but he must leave his children, for they belonged to his wife. He must also keep the peace with all the other husbands in the house, although it is easy to see that frequent occasions of quarrel would occur. In short, the man had constant and important reasons to be dissatisfied with the mother-family. He always had one alternative: he could capture a woman outside the group. If he did this he distinguished himself by military prowess and the woman was a trophy. He was not limited in his control of her or of their children by any customs or traditions, and he could arrange his life as he pleased. We should expect that great numbers of men would try this alternative, but it does not appear that many did so. If they had done so they would have speedily introduced man-descent and the father-family. As we well know, uncivilized men do not freely reflect on their experience or discuss reforms or speculate on progress; they accept custom and tradition and make the best of it as they find it. The change to the man-family was brought about by some great alteration in the condihons of the struggle for existence or by the invention of a new tool or weapon used by the men or by war with powerful neighbors. This much, however, can be said with confidence about the family under woman-descent: it was the conservative institution of that form of society and in it traditions were cherished and education was accomplished. It did not encourage change or cherish reforms, but preserved what had been inherited and protected what existed.

Probably the change from mother-family to father-family was by far the greatest and most important revolution in the history of civilization. This was so because the family, especially in primitive society, is such a fundamental institution that it forces all other societal details into conformity with itself. Miss Kingsley, speaking of the negroes of West Africa, describes societal details as follows: “The really responsible male relative is the mother's older brother. From him must leave to marry be obtained for either girl or boy; to him and the mother must the present be taken which is exacted on the marriage of a girl; and should the mother die, on him and not on the father lies the responsibility of rearing the children. They go to his house and he treats and regards them as nearer and dearer to himself than his own cliildren, and at his death, after his own brothers by the same mother, they become his heirs.” 1 These details are all consistent with the mother-family and are perfectly logical deductions from its principles. There never was any such thing as woman-rule, if by that it should be understood that women administered and conducted in detail the affairs of house or society, directing the men what they should do or not do; but the women of the Iroquois regulated the house life; they owned the land, in the only sense in which Indians could conceive of land-owning, because they tilled it; they established the reputation of warriors, and so determined who should be elected war chief in any new war, and they decided the treatment of captives. Women, however, never made a state, and war, so long as the woman-family existed, was always limited and imperfect. It was never decided whether a man must fight with his wife's people or go back to the clan in which he was born and fight with that. War was oftenest about women or about blood revenge. It was, as among our Indians, a raid and not a persistent campaign; it was mean, cowardly, savage, and marked by base bloodshed.

Much of this seems strange and inverted to us, because our society has long been characterized by the father-family. The state has long been the institution, or set of institutions, on which we rely for our most important interests and our notions of kinship, of rights, of moral right or wrong; and our ways of property, inheritance, trade, and intercourse have all been created by or adjusted to the system of man-descent. We can see what a great revolution had to be accomplished to go over from woman-descent to man-descent. Christian missionaries often find themselves entangled in this transition. In West Africa the native tie between mother and children is far closer than that between father and children, and the negro women do not like the change which white culture would bring about. In native law husband and wife have separate property, so that if white man's law was introduced, the woman would lose her property and would not get her husband's. The man also objects to giving his wife any claim on his property, while at the same time he does not want the children saddled on him. It seems to him utter absurdity that it should be his duty to care more for his wife than for his mother and sister. 1 At every point, in going over to the father-family, there is a transfer of rights and power and a readjustment of social theory.

In the long history of the man-family men have not been able to decide what they ought to think about women. It has been maintained that woman is man's greatest blessing and again that she is a curse. Also the two judgments have been united by saying that she is a cheat and a delusion, that is, she looks like a blessing while she is a curse. Each of those exaggerated views supports the other. Every blessing may appear doubtful, under circumstances; every curse will sometimes appear to be a blessing. What was most important about both these views was that man was regarded as independent and complete in the first place and the woman was brought to him as a helpmeet or assistan; at least as an inferior whose status and destiny came from her position as an adjunct. That was the position of woman in the man-family. We have abandoned part of the harshness of this construction of the status of woman and all the unkind deductions from it; the moral inferences, however, remain, and we regard them as self-evident and eternal. Loyalty to her husband is the highest virtue of a woman, and devotion to her family and sacrifice for it are the field of heroism for her. We speak of the Christian family as the highest form of the family, and in our literature and our current code the Christian family is considered as furnishing women with their grand arena for self-culture and social work. I cannot find that Christianity has done anything to shape the father-family; of the Jewish form the Old Testament tells us hardly anything. In Proverbs we find some weighty statements of general truths, universally accepted, and some ideal descriptions of a good wife. The words of Lemuel in chapter 31 are the only didactic treatment of the good wife in the Old Testament; she is described as a good housekeeper, a good cook, and a diligent needlewoman. Such was the ideal Jewish woman. In the New Testament there is no doctrine of marriage, no description of the proper family, and no exposition of domestic virtues. Down to the time of Christ it appears that each man was free to arrange his family as he saw fit. The rich and great had more than one wife or they had concubines. The Talmud allowed each man four wives, but not more. In fact, at the birth of Christ, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, all except the rich and great had no more than one wife each, on account of the trouble and expense of having more. Yet if circumstances, such as childlessness, seemed to make it expedient, anyone might take a second wife. Therefore it became a fact of the mores, of all but the rich and great, that all practiced pair-marriage and were educated in it.

Christianity took root in the lowest free classes. It got the mores from them and in later centuries gave those mores authority and extension, and this is the origin and historical source of the Christian family. The Pharisees are credited with introducing common sense into domestic relations. They made the Sabbath an occasion of “domestic joy,” bringing into increasing recognition the importance and dignity of woman as the builder and guardian of the home. They also set aside the seclusion of women at childbirth, in spite of the law. 1 A leader of the Pharisees introduced the Ketubah , or marriage document, “to protect the wife against the caprice of the husband.” The Shammaites would not permit a wife to be divorced except on suspicion of adultery, but the Hillelites allowed more easy divorce, for the “welfare and peace of the home.” 2 The ancient Romans practiced pure monogamy, but after they developed a rich leisure class, in the second century b.c ., they developed a luxurious polygamy. The traditions which came down into the Christian church were confused and inconsistent and various elements have from time to time got the upper hand in the history of the last nineteen hundred years. Gide says: “In a word, the law of the gospel accomplished a radical revolution in the constitution of the family. It broke domestic tyranny and recomposed the unity of the family by uniting all its members under mutual duties. It elevated and ennobled marriage by giving it a heavenly origin, and it made of marriage a union so intimate and so holy that God alone can break it.” 1

This is a good literary statement of what is generally taught and popularly believed, but it is impossible to verify it. We cannot tell what was the origin of our modern pair-marriage, but it grew up in the mores of the humble classes in which Christianity found root. In the first centuries of the Christian era the leading classes at Rome went through rapid corruption and decay, but the laboring classes had little share in this life. Christian converts could easily hold aloof from it. During the first four centuries Christians believed that the world was about to perish, and evidently this belief affected the whole philosophy of life, for marriage lost sense and the procreation of children lost interest. 2 It also helps to explain the outburst of asceticism and extravagant behavior, such as the renunciation of conjugal intimacy by married people. Paul also, as is well known, discusses the renunciation of marriage, but he speaks with remarkable restraint, and urges objections. John of Asia Minor appears in tradition as the apostle of virginity, and the glorification of virgins 3 confirms this view of his; but it is something quite different from this when false teachers are said in the Pastoral Epistles to hinder marriage. 1 Procreation as such was considered sin, and the cause of death's domination. Christ came to break away from it. 2 On the other hand, we have the idealizing of Christian motherhood 3 ; woman may fall into sin, but shall be saved through child-bearing. Sexual impulse is a foul frenzy, something devilish 4 ; stories of the lust of the devil and his companions after beautiful women make up the gnostic romances. The horribleness and insatiableness of the sensual passions are illustrated by all sorts of terrible tales. 5 It may indeed have happened, as the Acts of Thomas report, that bride and bridegroom from the very marriage-day renounced wedlock, and man and wife separated from one another; in particular, the continually recurring narratives of a converted wife avoiding common life with her unbelieving husband seem to be taken from life. We have the express witness, not only of Christian apologists, but also of the heathen physician Galen, that among the Christians many women and men abstained all their life from the intercourse of sex. It is not possible for us to estimate the actual spread of this kind of absolute renunciation. 6

On the one hand the women are little thought of. In the Clementine homilies (3: 22) it is expressly declared that the nature of woman is much inferior to that of man. Women, except the mother of Clement, play almost no rôle in this romance. 7 Professor Donaldson 8 shows the error of supposing that Christianity raised the status of women. “It is rather a formulation due to dogmatic than historical interests to assert that the worth of women came to recognition first in Christianity and in Christianity from the very beginning.” 1

Renan says that Christianity, in the second century of the Christian era, “gave complete satisfaction to just those needs of imagination and heart which then tormented the populations” around the Mediterranean. It offered a person and an ideal, and made no such demand on credulity as the old mythologies which had now lost their sense. It joined stoicism in hostility to idols and bloody sacrifices, and the faith in Jesus superseded ritual. Renan thinks it a wonder that Christianity did not sooner win control, but at Rome all the civil maxims were against it. 2 The latest scholars also recognize the strong rivalry between Christianity and Mithraism.

Tertullian (born 160 a.d. ) was an extremist among Christian ascetics, but he was one of the ablest and most influential men of his time. Addressing women he says 3 : “Woman, thou shouldst always be dressed in mourning and in rags, and shouldst not offer to the eyes anything but a penitent drowned in tears and thus shouldst thou pay ransom for thy fault in bringing the human race to ruin! Woman, thou art the gate by which the demon enters! It was thou who corruptedst him whom Satan did not dare to attack in face [man]. It is on thy account that Jesus Christ died.” It was the doctrine of the church fathers who lived about 400 a.d. that marriage is a consequence of original sin, and that, but for the first sin, God would have provided otherwise for the maintenance of the human species. 4 “Let us cut up by the roots,” said Jerome, “the sterile tree of marriage. God did indeed allow marriage at the beginning of the world, but Jesus Christ and Mary have now consecrated virginity.” Virginity thus furnished the ideal in the church, and not honest wedlock.

Juvenal and Tacitus give us pictures of Roman (heathen) society in the first centuries of the Christian era which would make us doubt if there was any family at all, but some of our later historians have well pointed out that we ought not to take the statements in Juvenal and Tacitus as characteristic of all Roman society. Let me quote two or three passages from Dill about Roman women of the empire: “Tacitus, here and there, gives glimpses of self-sacrifice, courageous loyalty, and humanity, which save his picture of society from utter gloom. The love and devotion of women shine out more brightly than ever against the background of baseness. Tender women follow their husbands or brothers into exile, or are found ready to share their death. Even the slave girls of Octavia brave torture and death in their hardy defence of her fair fame. There is no more pathetic story of female heroism than that of Politta, the daughter of L. Vetus. . . . Vetus himself was of the nobler sort of Roman men, who even then were not extinct. When he was advised, in order to save the remnant of his property for his grandchildren, to make the emperor chief heir, he spurned the servile proposal, divided his ready money among his slaves, and prepared for the end. When all hope was abandoned, father, grandmother, and daughter opened their veins and died together in the bath. . . .

“The bohemian man of letters [Juvenal] had heard many a scandal about great ladies, some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by prurient gossip, after passing through a hundred tainted imaginations. In his own modest class, female morality, as we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age. There were aristocratic families, too, where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any matron of the olden days. The ideal of purity, both in men and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny, and of Plutarch, there were not only the most spotless and high-minded women, there were also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S. Jerome and S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid, that ‘debauchee of the imagination,’ writes to his wife, from his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest affection. . . .

“Dion Chrysostom was probably the first of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which he assails an evil which he regards as not only dishonoring to human nature, but charged with the poison of far-spreading corruption. Juvenal's ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself. The great world was bad enough; but there was another world beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalized. . . .

“From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the mother of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia. The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus. Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Cænis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame. The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. . . . Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.” 1

The Christian emperors made the dower of the wife not simply the property of the two spouses. It was the endowment of the new household, a sort of reserve fund which the law assures to the children which they would find intact in spite of the ruin of their family, if it should occur. The dower was offset also by the gift propter nuptias which the man must give. The law also provided that the dower and the gift propter nuptias should be equal and that the spouses should have the same rights of survivorship. 2 These seem to be distinct improvements on the dotal system, but that system has dropped out of popular use in modern times and the advantage of this legislation has been lost with it.

The family was more affected by the imperial constitutions of the fourth century, which enacted the views and teachings of the clergy of that time. Constantine endeavored to put an end to concubinage, and the power of mothers over their children as to property and marriage was made equal to that of fathers 3 It appears that the collapse of the ancient society and the decay of the old religion with the rise of Christianity and Mithraism with new codes of conduct and duty produced anarchy in the mores, which are the everyday guides of men as to what they ought to do. On the one side we find asceticism and extreme rigor and then by the side of it, in the Christian church, extravagant license and grotesque doctrine. What element conquered, and why, it seems impossible to say. The society of western Europe emerged from the period of decay and rejuvenation in the twelfth century with some wild passions and dogmas of commanding force. Overpopulation produced social pressure and distress with the inevitable tragedy in human affairs. The other world was figured by unrestrained imagination and religion went back to primitive daimonism.

Out of this period came the canon law. “Of all civil institutions, marriage is the one which the canon law most carefully regulated, and this is the idea from which all its prescriptions were derived; viz. , marriage is a necessary evil which must be tolerated, but the practice of which must be restrained.” 1 The doctrine of this law is that “woman was not made in the image of God. Hence it appears that women are subordinated to men, and that the law meant them to be almost servants in the household.” 2 From this starting-point the law went on rationally, although it contained two inconsistent ideas, the merit of wedlock and the merit of celibacy. The product of such inconsistency was necessarily base. Some parts of the literary record which remain to us would lead us to believe that the whole society was brutal and vicious, but when we thlnk of the thousands of families who died without ever making a mark on the record we must believe that domestic virtue and happiness were usual and characteristic of the society. The best proof of this is presented by the efforts at reform throughout the fifteenth century and the vigor of the reformation of the sixteenth century. The hot disputes between Protestants and Catholics turned chiefly on the doctrine of the mass and on sacerdotal claims, but they contained also an element of dissatisfaction with inherited mores about marriage and the family. The Protestants denounced the abuses which had grown up around the monasteries and the gratuitous misery of celibacy. They, however, lost the old ideas about marriage and divorce and the Catholics denounced them for laxity and vice. At the Council of Trent, in 1563, the Catholics made a new law of marriage, in which they redefined and strengthened the ritual element.

Out of all that strife and turmoil our modern family has come down to us. The churches and denominations are now trying to win something in their rivalry with each other by the position they adopt in regard to marriage and divorce and the family. The family in its best estate, now among us, is a thing which we may contemplate with the greatest satisfaction. When the parents are united by mutual respect and sincere affection and by joint zeal for the welfare of their children, the family is a field of peace and affection in which the most valuable virtues take root and grow and character is built on the firmest foundation of habit. The family exists by tradition and old custom faithfully handed on. Our society, however, has never yet settled down to established order and firm tradition since the great convulsion of the sixteenth century. Perhaps the family still shows more fluctuation and uncertainty than any other of our great institutions. Different households now differ greatly in the firmness of parental authority and the inflexibility of filial obedience. Many nowadays have abandoned the old standards of proper authority and due obedience. The family has to a great extent lost its position as a conservative institution and has become a field for social change. This, however, is only a part of the decay of doctrines once thought most sound and the abandonment of standards once thought the definition of good order and stability. The changes in social and political philosophy have lowered the family. The family has not successfully resisted them. Part of the old function of the family seems to have passed to the primary school, but the school has not fully and intelligently taken up the functions thrown upon it. It appears that the family now depends chiefly on the virtue, good sense, conception of duty, and spirit of sacrifice of the parents. They have constantly new problems to meet. They want to do what is right and best. They do not fear change and do not shrink from it. So long as their own character is not corrupted it does not appear that there is any cause for alarm.

III: THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN CHALDEA, EGYPT, INDIA, JUDEA, AND GREECE TO THE TIME OF CHRIST [1909]

In general, the status of women has been controlled, in all civilization up to the highest, by their power to help in the work of life. Where women have had important functions they have been valued; where they have needed protection and support, and have not been able to contribute much, they have been treated with contempt. If the economic situation is strong, so that each man can pay a good price for a wife, girls are valuable in the contrary ease female infanticide arises. If the women's contribution to the food supply is essential, womens' are well treated; while if the men are warlike meat-eaters, they treat women as drudges, tempering the treatment with respect for them as necessary mothers of warriors. Among nomads the status of women is low, and women, children, and the aged are regarded as burdens. The two former are necessary, but all are treated capriciously. Under agriculture women win a position of independent cooperation. When towns are built women incur dangers on the streets and complications arise; their position in rural life is then far more free than in towns. Public security in the latter once more changes the ease. When women are valued for grace and beauty and are objects of affection, not means of gain, they win, as compared with earlier stages. An Arabic Jew of the tenth century, Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, says of Poland at that time that grain was cheap and the bride-price for wives high. Therefore, if a man had many daughters, he was rich; if he had many sons he was poor. 1 The interplay of interests under the forms of material gain, sex-passion, and vanity is here most complicated and fierce; but the interference of philosophy and religion is noticeably slight. The phases are many, and there is not a feeling of the human heart which does not bear upon the sex-relation in one way or another. Masculine love of rule and domination, and masculine generosity, to an object of affection, have modified every status.” Fuegians prefer boys, who when they grow up will be a means of strength and protection to their parents. 2 The Amarr-Bambala celebrate the birth of a boy with a ban-quet; boys will become the strength of the country as hunters and warriors. 3 The Ossetes celebrate the birth of boys only. 4 Such is the usual sentiment, but in frequent cases girls are preferred. The Basutos find it a financial calamity if a woman bears all boys, for girls are salable and constitute a capital. 5 In Kamerun a girl is preferred because she will soon bring a bride-price, 6 Amongst Hindus, “when a son is born there is gréat rejoicing in the family and friends come with their congratulations, but on the birth of a daughter there are no sounds indicative of gladness in the house.” 7 When a boy is born the conch shell is blown to call all the neighbors to rejoice; when a girl is born the conch shell is silent and neighbors offer condolences. 1 “It is believed by an average Hindu that a male child is the fruit of the propitiation of ancestors.” 2 The Aryans thought daughters a sorrow, sons the father's pride and glory. 3

The status of women is therefore a symptom of the mores because all the interests and feelings of man converge in it. It furnishes one of the most prominent illustrations of the traditional persistence of the mores through ages, even in spite of changes in interests, and of the ultimate triumph of interests in the mores. The phenomena are intricate and perplexing, but it is certain that we can never understand them unless we follow those indications in them which show us the mores as their ultimate explanation.

The remotest stage of civilized society which is known to us is that represented in the laws of Hammurabi as existing in the Euphrates valley 2500 years before Christ. In those laws men and women appear to be on an equality of personal rights. Three classes, wives, concubines, and slaves, axe recognized. 4 The laws of Hammurabi and the laws of Moses point back to a common law of the Semitic peoples of Western Asia (Müiller traces this out), and the society is evidently an old one, with well-established folkways, which are codified in these laws. Winckler 5 is able to show, from the position of the vernal equinox in the signs of the zodiac, that Chaldean culture must date back to the fifth millennium b.c. , and Barton fixes dates as far back as 6000 b.c. The code of Hammurabi is elaborate and systematic, and so it can hardly have been the first one. Back of it there must have been a long period of usage and custom. It is assumed in the laws of Hammurabi that a man will have but one wife, but as to concubines and slaves he arranges his affairs as he judges expedient for his own welfare. The laws define the rights of the parties in certain contingencies, and thus make wedlock a legal status, not a contract. The status, however, is plainly the product of mores which have been matured through a long period. The marriage gifts also show that long usage had produced elaborate customs. The bridegroom pays a bride-price (a survival of primitive purchase), but he also gets a dowry with his wife; furthermore the bride's father gives her a gift which is a peculium of hers — pin money — and the groom also gives her a present. Men can repudiate their wives at will, but they must provide for the wives if the latter are not guilty. If the woman is childless, the relation has failed of its primary purpose and is dissolved as a matter of course. A woman who has borne a child to a man, even if she is only a slave, has a claim on him and security by his side. Women can also leave their husbands, if the latter fail of the duties of a husband. There were consecrated women under religious vows, but not vowed to virginity, and public women. Müller 1 thinks that perhaps these two classes are priests who dress in woman's dress and women who dress in man's dress — two classes of hierodules. The former were provided for under a system which was equivalent to life-annuity. 2 Among the Tel-el-Amarna tablets 3 (1500 b.c. ) there is a story of a god and his wife. He abuses her, but when she remonstrates they make up the quarrel and “whatsoever she wished to have done was done from that time forth forever more.”

The laws of Hammurabi show that the problems of matrimony were the same 2500 years before Christ that they are now, and have been ever since. It is asserted that the excavations of Telloh show that the mother-family existed in Chaldea in the third millennium b.c. ; that the wife was “goddess of the home,” and that she could expel her husband from it. 1 Later, perhaps through Semitic influence, the man got control and the institutions of the father-family were fully developed; e.g., patria potestas , sacrifices by the father to ancestors. A son could take only a concubine, not a wife, without, the father's consent. A slave woman would resent it if her master took no notice of her; the popular poetry represented her case, and there was reason to fear her arts and magic. 2

In the old Babylonian kingdom the husband could dismiss his wife at will by giving her a bill of divorcement, and frequent injunctions not to do it show that it often occurred; consequently the woman was powerless and rightless against her husband, although her dignity and authority in the house and over her children were great. If repudiated she could marry again. 3 Repudiated wives, however, were the “strange women” of antiquity; wandering adventuresses, without husbands or status where they were met with, and living by vice. 4 As wealth and social activity increased in the Euphrates valley, polygamy became commoner, women were secluded more and more, and they lost their primitive independence of status. In Chaldea all women of the higher classes were cloistered in the harem and never appeared by the side of husbands and brothers as they did in Egypt. 1 The harem system, at least for Western Asia and Europe, originated here. The contracts of the period of Babylonian and Assyrian glory show that wives were then rarely bought; one such contract only from that period is known, but the terms in it are more crassly commercial than in the contracts of the old Babylonian period. 2 A wife brought a dowry to her husband, or there were no gifts, or each father stated in the contract what he would give to the young people; if there was a dowry the ownership remained in the wife, but the husband had the use; if a man refused his approval to the marriage of his son, the woman whom the son took became a slave. Married women could do business and make contracts without the intervention of their hus, bands in any way. 3 A very important device, which helped to produce monogamy, was the stipulation in the contract that, if the man took a second wife, he should pay a specified amercement. Many contracts have been found in which slave concubinage and prostitution are provided for in the most matter-of-fact, commercial terms. 4 The Assyrians were fierce and cruel; the Babylonians were more poetical, industrial, and artistic. 5 The former represent on their monuments very rarely any domestic scenes; a queen is once shown feasting with the king, 6 but the only other women on the monuments are captives. Female charms are rarely noticed. We must, however, note that the monuments are all from public buildings, 1 In Babylonia every woman must, once in her life, submit to a stranger, in the temple of Melitta (Venus), for money, which was put in the temple treasury. 2

Wherever women are treated with tyranny and cruelty, and are denied rights, that is, redress, they kill their husbands. In the laws of Hamraurabi a woman who killed her husband was to be either hanged or impaled, the meaning of the word being uncertain, 3 With increasing wealth and the distinction of classes, the mores for rich and poor diverged, for women who had property could defend their interests. They held and admlnistered property, made contracts, etc. In the poem of Gilgamesh, the hero, addressing the ghost of his friend and enumerating the miseries of the dead, says: “Thou canst no longer embrace the wife whom thou lovest, nor beat the wife whom thou hatest.” 4 We must take this to represent the mores of the highest classes. Women of the lower classes in Chaldea, whether legitimate wives or not, went about the streets freely unveiled, while those of the upper classes lived in seclusion, or, if they went out, were surrounded by attendants. 5 In all societies women of the poorer classes have to encounter annoyances and have to protect themselves, while seclusion becomes, for the richer, a badge of superiority and a gratification of vanity. Usages which were devised to cherish and pet women become restraints on their liberty and independence, for when they are treated as unequal to the risks and tasks of life by men who take care of them, the next stage is that the men treat them as inferior and contemptible, and will not grant them dignity and respect. When they escape responsibility they lose liberty. Nevertheless, the customs, if introduced by the higher classes, spread downward by imitation; so it must have been with clositering and veiling. Men got security without care, women got the sense of refinement and elegance and of aristocratic usage; the interest of men and the vanity of women thus cooperated to establish the folkways which lowered the status of the latter.

In the early Aryan society the status of a wife depended on whether she was childless, bore daughters, or bore sons. In the first case she was blamed, being considered guilty, and was treated accordingly; in the last case she enjoyed honor. 1

In that form of the religion of India which appears in the laws of Manu, and in the Mahabharata (about the beginning of the Christian era), fathers chose husbands for their daughters and proposed the marriage, but women also proposed to men who pleased them. Manu allows them to choose, but disapproves of it because the motive would be sexual desire, and for the same reason he classes love marriages as a bad form of marriage. 2

“Husband-selections” were public ceremonies at which the suitors of princesses entered into competition for them, although the woman could, to some extent at least, set aside the result. 3 Devayani was given as a wife by her father to Yayati; he also gave her maid with her, telling Yayati to honor her, but not to make her his wife. Yayati begot two sons by his wife and three by the maid, and therefore Devayani went home to her father, saying: “Yayati has learned what duty is [from the Veda] and yet he has committed sin.” 4 In the Nal episode the hero, charmed by the consent of the heroine, promises her life-long fidelity. 1 “The best medicine of the physicians is not so good for a man, in any ill, as a faithful and beloved wife.” 2 There are, in the poem, very striking love stories, especially about the fidelity and sacrifice of lovers, but one woman says that a wife turns away from a husband who has cherished her as soon as he gets into trouble. A little trouble, it is said, outweighs in the minds of women long happiness; they have fickle hearts, and no great virtues can win them to fidelity. 3 The law of India is full of hostile expressions against the female sex; it not only puts them in a position of inferiority to men, but even refuses them the position of persons endowed with independent rights. Manu 4 says: “It is the nature of woman to seduce man in this world”; “women are able to lead astray in this world, not only a fool, but even a learned man, and to make him a slave of desire and anger.” A woman is to be always under tutelage; she can have no property, give no testimony, maintain no suit, make no contracts, and conduct no affairs. The books, however, contain also expressions of praise of women, and these fundamental principles are traversed to some extent by more humane ideas. “Where women are honored there the gods are pleased, but where they are not honored no sacred rite yields reward”; “in that family where the husband is pleased with his wife and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting.” 5 In the early philosophical period women were freely admitted to hear and share in the discussion of theological and philosophical questions. 6

The law-givers conceive of woman as a necessary evil. She is the soil which man requires to produce the desired offspring of marriage. This is one of the many cases in which the status of woman has been influenced by the accepted notions about the respective shares of the sexes in procreation. Marriage is the only sacrament in India in which woman has a share. The essentials of the wedding are the ceremonial of joining hands and taking seven steps together around the sacred fire with recital of formulas of blessing. The ceremony was entirely domestic and the parties married themselves. Marriage by purchase is one of the honorable forms, but Manu says 1 : “No man who knows the law must take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter; for a man who, through avarice, takes a gratuity is a seller of his offspring.” The bride-price is to be construed otherwise. Other texts recognize this form of marriage with less reserve. Jolly says that the apparent revulsion against purchase was not in the mores, but was a symptom of a more friendly tone of mind of the lawgiver toward women. In southern India purchase is at the present time almost the only form of marriage. In the Vedic hymns the relation of husband and wife is represented as one of intimate affection, confidence, and cooperation. The place of the wife was especially marked by the fact that she participated with her husband in the household sacrifices, and in the house she was in authority over all the inmates. Only one could occupy this position. Manu's 2 precepts for a wife are that, although the husband is destitute of virtue, or seeks pleasure elsewhere, she is to regard him as a god, and is to make no vow or sacrifices apart from him. Manu also expresses the “one flesh” idea: “Learned Brahmins propound this maxim likewise: ‘The husband is declared to be one with the wife.’” 3

The jurists expressed this mystical unity in the provisions that man and wife could not go surety for each other, bear witness, contract debts, maintain suits, or divide property with each other. These are necessary corollaries of the “one flesh” doctrine. In respect to joint property there has been an important development toward the independence of women. 1 In the wedding ceremony the groom led the bride around the domestic fire-altar three times, saying: “I am male; thou art female. Come, let us marry. Let us possess offspring. United in affection, illustrious, well-disposed toward each other, let us live for a hundred years.” 2 Although this formula was here directed only to procreation, it is an interesting historical parallel to the Roman formula and to a German formula, which latter ones had relation to rights.

“We shall not err if we understand that women in Iranian antiquity had substantially the same status as in Vedic India, or amongst the ancient Germans, or in the Homeric age of Greece. In all these cases we meet with the same conditious” 3 ; that is to say, that in the ultimate forms of civilized society the status of women which we find is the same.

In the Zendavesta the sexes appear equal in rights and honor, but they never were so in fact in historical times. Zoroaster, according to the tradition, had three wives 4 Each man had concubines and slaves according to his means and his own judgment of his personal welfare, as was the case throughout the whole ancient world. The most remarkable feature of the Iranian social system was the injunction to practice the closest incestuous marriages as the most meritorious. 1 This is a very interesting case of the survival of primitive mores into a later religion, and the reason for it was intense desire to maintain the blood-purity of a caste, a desire which had become a predominant motive. 2 For this reason, although courtesans existed, intercourse with them was strongly disapproved, and the mores imposed strict rules on women of the nation. 3 A man was praised for giving his daughter in marriage and ordered to do so as penance for his own sins; thus the interests of the daughter might be subordinated to those of the father. The wedding ceremony was a union of hands with prayers and formulas of words, in which, and in the ceremonies of transfer to her husband's house, the bride is spoken of as the comrade and equal of her husband and as his companion in the household. 4 On the one hand, these rules imposed on a man a status-wife, and on the other hand, as in all such cases, they caused love unions with foreigners and defeated their own purpose. Marriage was encouraged and premiums were given for large families, which seems to show that the premiums were necessary. 5 There are historical cases in which Persians showed very great attachment to their wives. 6

The status of women in the Old Testament is that which has been described as prevailing in Western Asia in the earlier form. Very little is said about women; they play no rôle, and have no function in religion. Ruth is a heroine because when she, as a widow, had a right to return to her home and people, she chose to remain with her husband's family and nation and to adhere to his religion. Esther is a political heroine, while Athaliah and Jezebel seize power, as women did upon occasion in other states. In the Proverbs we hear what a good thing a good woman is; what a bad thing a bad woman or wife is. This might all be equally well said of husbands, but it is not said, because it was not in the mores to think of men in the same light. The model woman 1 is an industrious housewife. Woman is a coadjutor to man, though, according to the story in Genesis, she brought woe upon him. “The status of woman is characterized by the fact that she was always the property of some man”; she was the property of her father, who sold her to her husband. Her duty was to bear children and do household work. The man was not bound to exclusive fidelity; the woman was, under penalty of death. A priest might not mourn for his wife, 2 for she was not as near to him as his family kin, including his unmarried sister. This excluded his married sister, as if she went into the kin of her husband, which is inconsistent. A widow did not inherit from her husband, but the heir must care for her. A woman's vow required the confirmation of her father or husband. 3

A man could have concubines and slaves; it was, however, a very important effect of the later strict endogamy of the Jews that these could be only Jews, and were, therefore, in a protected status, and were nationally equal to the wife; but the case of a war-captive, necessarily a foreigner, at the mercy of the captor, is allowed for. 4 Polygamy was the current usage 5 ; divorce was easy at the will of the man; motherhood was the chief function of women. Throughout the canon of the Old Testament violation of the sex-taboo is earnestly condemned and made a subject of warning and of prohibition in the name of Yahveh. Sex-vice, including abortion, exposure of infants, and child sacrifice, are set forth as the distinguishing traits of the heathen, and an abomination to Yahveh. The prophets were constantly fighting the mores of the Jews, which coincided with those of the other people of Western Asia. 1 The Jews who returned to Judea were a selection of those who had the strongest national feeling and who thought that the captivity had been a chastisement of Yahveh. In the rabbinical period, with intenser national feeling, the antagonism to heathenism and sex-vice was even more strongly emphasized, and they often hold the first place in ethical exhortation and discussion. The importance attached, in the New Testament, to eating things offered to idols might not seem comprehensible, but it is conjoined with denunciation of sex-vice, and sex-vice and heathenism went together, and were the antipodes of Christianity. These sentiments entered deeply into the Jewish mores of the rabbinical period, while the standard of marital life, the conception of matrimony, and the status of women remained about on the level of the surrounding nations. Women were held to be inferior, as agents of seduction and evil; a father or husband had a hard task to keep daughter or wife from evil.

In Esdras 2 is an interesting argument to prove that woman is the most powerful thing amongst men; she is alluring and may be wicked, and is classed with wine as a cause of ruin to men. 3 All the wisdom of all the ages and nations reiterates the same few propositions. The woman was held to strict fidelity in marriage, but not the man. The rule of divorce in Deut. 24: 1 was greatly enlarged, although sects differed about it. Hardly anywhere in the rabbinical writings do we find any high conception of wedlock 1 ; in the rabbinical period there was a tendency to depreciate all sex-relations, as a consequence of the strong antagonism to heathenism; there is even some glorification of virginity and of long widowhood, 2 and a legend that Rachel withdrew from conjugal life and chose continency. 3 The Essenes, beginning in the second century b.c. , rejected marriage and depended on new adherents to continue their sect. The Therapeuts did not reject marriage, but they honored celibacy. 4 The Talmudists said that a man might marry as many wives as he could support, but he was exhorted to take not more than four; it appears doubtful if many men in that period (early centuries of the Christian era) took more than one. 5 Polygamy was put under definite taboo in 1020 a.d. ; women were also given more and more definite right of divorce, and divorce by the man from caprice or malice was restrained. Still dicta are quoted which allow wide freedom of divorce to both. 6

The biblical scholars 7 now tell us that the story of the creation of woman in the second chapter of Genesis dates from about 775 b.c. It is very primitive myth-making. The processes and machinery are all described. So the woman is made out of a rib of man, and the man perceives that he and she were “one flesh.” Then follows the enigmatical utterance that the man shall leave father and mother and go to his wife. In what social horizon could that rule arise? Nobody in the father-family ever did it, except heiress-husbands. 1 However, but for this rule there would be no establishment of pair-marriage in this text. If the husband goes to the wife he will have but one, unless it be exceptionally or by some confusion of usages. The first chapter of Genesis is held to have been written not before 500 b.c. It is very simple and direct, and is written as history, not myth; the human race is created in two sexes, and nothing states or implies pair-marriage. It cannot be supposed that the man was said to go to the woman, in opposition to almost universal usage, in order to suggest pair-marriage. Then modern men have read their own mores into these texts, and established such a tradition that we do not perceive that the text does not contain the institution. How could the Jews practice polygamy through their whole history if on the first page of the law stood an injunction of pair-marriage? They did not see it there because it is not there.

The position of women amongst the Jews at the time of Christ was what it was generally in the Greco-Roman world; their place was domestic and their chief function was to bear children. The New Testament Gospels contain very little about women, but later Christian hagiology created myths about the two Marys and Martha to satisfy the demand. The Epistles contain doctrines of marriage which are not fully consistent. One view is that marriage is a pis aller for sin. 2 The most important question is that of the effect on a preexisting marriage of conversion of husband or wife to Christianity. The rabbis held the current contemptuous opinion of women; Hillet is quoted as saying, “More women, more witchcrafts.” 1 Woman, according to the current belief, was not saved through the Law, but through child-bearing. 2 Philo gives as the reason why the Essenes did not marry that “a wife is a selfish creature, immoderately smitten with jealousy, terrible at shaking to their foundations the natural habits of a man, and bringing him under power by continual beguilements. For as she practices fair false speeches and other kinds of hypocrisy, as it were upon the stage, when she has succeeded in alluring eyes and ears, like cheated servants, she brings cajolery to bear upon the sovereign mind. Moreover, if there are children she begins to be puffed up with pride and license of tongue, and all the things which before she speciously offered in a disguised manner in irony, she now summons forth with a more daring confidence, and shamelessly forces her way into actions, every one of which is hostile to communion. For the man who is bound under spells of wife or children, being made anxious by the bond of nature, is no longer the same person toward others, but is entirely changed, having become, without being aware of it, a slave instead of a free man.” 3

The status of women in Egypt was so free that the Greeks ridiculed the Egyptians as woman-ridden; Herodotus 4 says that the women went to market and the men wove at home. Descent was through women and was marked by the mother's name, which the child bore, while the tie of father and child was slight. 5 In the tombs of the old kingdom (before 2000 b.c. ) the wife and mother of the deceased are represented; hardly ever the father. A very peculiar arrangement was that a man's next heir was his grandson by his eldest daughter, and that a boy's next friend and protector was his maternal grandfather. This arrangement was very ancient and was deeply rooted in the mores. 1 The women of the harem of Thothmes III got up a conspiracy against him (about 1600 b.c. ) and were able to organize a large force of men and officers in it. 2 From about 740 b.c. a college of priestesses at Thebes became the political authority in that city, the chief priestess concentrating the political power in herself. 3 Some of these features of society seem to be survivals of the mother-family, but Herodotus saw 341 statues of successive priests in descent from father to son, which covered, as the Egyptians said, 11,340 years, 4 and would indicate father descent for that period. Herodotus 5 reports that each man had but one wife, “like the Greeks,” but Diodorus 6 says that only priests were restricted to one. Kings certainly had more than one and probably great men also, and there were besides concubines and slaves. Prostitution was in effect organized in the service of religion. 7

In the Precepts of Ptah-hotep , which date from about 2600 b.c. , it is said: “If thou wouldst be wise, rule thy house and love thy wife wholly and constantly. Fill her stomach and clothe her body, for these are her personal necessities. Love her tenderly and fulfill all her desires as long as thou hast thy life, for she is an estate which conferreth great reward upon her lord. Be not harsh to her, for she will be more easily moved by persuasion than by force. Take thou heed to that which she wisheth and to that to which her desire runneth, and to that upon which she fixeth her mind [and obtain it for her], for thereby shalt thou make her to stay in thy house. If thou resistest her will, it is ruin to thee. Speak to her heart and show her thy love.” 1 The extremest “friend of woman” in any age might admit that these precepts are excessive; if they ever were approximately in the mores, the derision of the Greeks did not lack justification. A later writer of unspecified date warns against the “strange woman” like the writer of Proverbs 2 : “Beware of a strange woman who is not known where she is. Do not look at her when she comes and do not know her. She is like a current of deep water, the whirling force of which one does not know. The woman whose husband is absent writes to thee every day. If there is no witness near her, she rises and spreads her net! O crime worthy of death when one hears of it.” Have nothing to do with her and take a wife in thy youth, because “the best thing is one's own house,” and because “a wife will give thee a son like thyself.” 3

In Egypt in the class of nobles every woman “brought some land to her husband as dower, but daughters took it away again, so that the fortunes of a family depended on the proportion of females born in it. 4 Each wife had her own house, given to her by her parents or her husband; thus there was no conjugal domicile and the man was not “head of the family,” but a guest in his wife's house. The wife administered her own property and received a stipend from her husband; if she contributed to the expenses, she did so voluntarily. In a marriage contract of the time of Ptolemy III (247–221 b.c. ) the man promises not to claim the authority of a husband, to give to the woman slaves who are named, and to let her dispose of them without interference from him; he recognizes as hers all debts due to her and makes them collectible by her agent; if the husband collects any of them, he promises to pay the proceeds to her and to pay her a penalty besides. In a corresponding document, by a woman, she acknowledges the receipt of the marriage gift and of her share of the goods, and promises to return the same if she is unfaithful. 1 This last stipulation is an exact inversion of the case where the man, by custom or contract, receives a dower which he must repay if he repudiates the woman. Erman 2 thinks that conjugal relations were happy and affectionate. A widower, who had been told by a magician that his second wife had caused an illness from which he suffered, wrote and put in her tomb a letter of remonstrance, in which he rehearsed his attentions and devotion to her.

The Egyptian mores must be accounted for by the extreme traditionalism of that people which caused survivals of old customs to persist by the side of new ones. Contact with Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks produced change but very slowly, although Egyptian men must have been instigated to borrow foreign customs by all motives of selfish interest and vanity. Paturet 3 thinks that he can discern a change in the marriage system after about 500 b.c. ; from a free and equal relation it became more servile on the part of the woman and the Semitic notion that there could be no full marriage without a property pledge was accepted in Egypt. Later the woman, without selling herself entirely, made a contract of limited duty. She was lower than if she had sold herself permanently or given herself away. “Nothing in his home experience had prepared a Greek to see a respectable woman come and go in liberty, without veil and without escort, carrying a burden on her shoulder instead of on her head, like a man, running about the market, keeping shop, while her husband or father was shut up at home, weaving fabrics, mixing potter's clay, and turning the potter's wheel or working at his trade. It was an easy inference that the man was a slave and the wife mistress of the family.” 1 Accordingly, as soon as a Greek dynasty was seated on the throne, we find that Ptolemy IV (221–205 b.c. ) made an ordinance which restrained Egyptian married women by Greek law; gifts and contracts between man and wife ceased, and the wife needed the authorization of her husband for her acts. 2 Under Mohammedanism in Egypt we find the mores completely reversed. The Roman conquest and christianization acted to remold Egyptian mores as to the status of women, a change which may have been brought about before Mohammedanism came in. All the conquerors were antagonistic to the Egyptian mores in regard to this matter, and they favored the change, which was in the interest of men.

In Homer the relations of young unmarried persons is free and unconventional, although there is a code of propriety. Wives were bought and the bargain is very purely commercial in motive; fathers were also moved by political and dynastic motives. The purchase contract and the formal ceremony distinguished the status-wife from the concubine; and there were also slaves and captives who were at their lords' mercy. The concubine or slave, who had no status, was chosen for love. “When the chief wife was also the loved wife, affection was very strong and true”; the best example is that of Hector and Andromache. Wives were held to fidelity: Penelope was a heroine; Clytemnestra “led to bitter words against all women.” The fidelity of women is a duty on account of the rights which their masters have acquired in them by capture or purchase; if they violate it the paramour must pay a fine. No divorce occurs in Homer. The gods and goddesses present a picture or another community marked throughout by disreputable conduct as compared with the human community. 1 The quarrels of Zeus and Hera give us a picture of conjugal life which is more distasteful than any presented as of men. The pair are vain, frivolous, and jealous, and give cause for jealousy; their love-making is not dignified; they live like a couple in a French novel, who have decided to get on by not demanding too much of each other. It is a mistake to think that the custom of “purchase” degraded women; we find that, in barbarism, purchase is explained as a remuneration to the father for the expense of rearing the girl — she is not “bought” like a slave. Purchase also runs down through all grades of ceremony and survival. Then, too, the woman's father gave her a dowry-like gift, a transaction which shows that the purchase idea no longer characterizes the relation of the parties, but is a survival by the side of a new conception of marriage. From a pecuniary point of view the two gifts were incongruous, but as regards the sentiments which determined their meaning, they could well continue together. 2 The wooing in Homer is simple and natural, open and straightforward, though the language is often naïve and to our usage unrefined. The mores are not clearly defined because of the military and heroic plane on which the poems move. The women attend the heroes in the bath, a custom which to us seems inconsistent with the other sex mores but it illustrates well the power of the mores to extend approval, for the sake of an interest, to an incongruous usage. The gods give wives, so that marriages are made in heaven; they bless the marriage of a man who pleases them, 1 and they give children. 2 “Nothing is stronger and nobler than when man and wife, united in harmony of mind, rule their house in wisdom.” 3 Achilles says: “Every brave and sensible man loves his consort.” 4 Cases occur in which a man renounces a slave woman out of respect to his wife. 5 but there are others in which he declares that he prefers the slave woman. 6 The ease of Penelope was complicated: it was not sure that her husband was dead; her son was a boy, but he grew to manhood and became her guardian as she had been his. She was clever and wise and managed well a difficult situation the phases of which changed as time went on, but always presented new difficulties. Telemachus declared to her with rude plainness that he was master 7 ; he told her to go to the women's quarters and attend to the housework and to leave deliberation to men. Thus he defined her “sphere.” Hesiod, as quoted in the Anthology of Stobæus, 8 says: “If a man has had the luck to get a wife who suits him, that is the acme of good fortune; if he has a bad one it is the worst disaster.” Menander is also quoted: “If we rightly judge the matter, marriage is indeed an evil, but necessity imposes this evil on us.”