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but, save under the strictest limitations for the common good, "thou shalt not marry."[1]
Here, again, a glance at primitive conditions mav serve to illustrate my point. Without entering on any vexed questions of origins, it is now accepted on all hands that in the social state known as Exogamy we find one of the earliest instances of marriage, or, rather, anti-marriage law, of inhibition of the sex-impulse by the herd. Savages over a large portion of the globe are still found who form themselves into groups with totems, sacred animals or plants whose name they bear. Within these totem groups they agree not to marry—the Buffalo man may not marry a Buffalo girl; he may marry an Antelope girl. All Antelope women are his potential wives. All Buffalo girls are "tabu," are his "sisters,"' or his "mothers." Sex, if it is not, as some sociologists think, the origin of the pugnacious instinct in man, is at least often closely neighboured by it. By the institution of exogamy, by the tabu on the women of a man's own group, peace is in this respect secured—secured, he it noted, not through sex union, but by its limitation, its prohibition.
All this, you will say, is curious and interesting: but really too primitive to be of any avail. We have shed these savage instincts. Pugnacity about sex is really out of date, as irrelevant to humanity as the horns that the buffalo exhibits in fighting for his mate. I am not so sure that pugnacity in relation to sex is really obsolete, since sex is still shadowed by its dark familiar,
- ↑ I use "marriage" throughout this paper to mean simply the union of man and woman irrespective of any forms or ceremonies that may attend it.
