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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/143

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ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAMILY.
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ments, and having no weapons but their agricultural inplements who are industrially advanced to the extent that there is exchange of services, and that the men do all the out-of-door work; and they are monogamous. Similarly the monogamous Lepchas are wholly unwarlike. Such, too, is the relation of traits in certain societies of the New World distinguished from the rest by being partially or entirely industrial. Whereas most of the aborigines of North America habitually polygynous, live solely to hunt and fight, the Iroquois had permanent villages and cultivated lands, and each of them had but one wife. More marked still is the case of the Pueblos, who, "walling out barbarism" by their ingeniously-conglomerated houses, fight only in self-defense, and when let alone engage exclusively in agricultural and other industries, and whose marital relations are strictly monogamic.

This connection of traits in the simpler societies, where not traceable directly in the inadequate descriptions of travelers, is often traceable indirectly. We have seen that there is a natural relation between constant fighting and development of chiefly power: the implication being that where, in settled tribes, the chiefly power is small, the militancy is not great. And this is the fact in those above-named communities characterized by monogamy. In Dory there are no chiefs; among the Dyaks subordination to chiefs is feeble; the headman of each Bodo and Dhimals village has but nominal authority; the Lepcha flees from coercion; and the governor of a Pueblo town is annually elected. Conversely, we see that the polygyny which prevails in simple predatory tribes persists in aggregates of them welded together by war into small nations under established rulers, and frequently acquires in them large extensions. In Polynesia it characterizes in a marked way the warlike and tyrannically-governed Feejeeans; all through the African kingdoms there goes polygyny along with developed chieftainship, rising to great heights in Ashantee and Dahomey, where the governments are coercive in extreme degrees. The like may be said of the extinct American societies: polygyny was an attribute of dignity among the rigorously-ruled Peruvians, Mexicans, Chibchas, Nicaraguans. And the old despotisms of the East were also characterized by polygyny.

Allied with this evidence is the evidence that in a primitive predatory tribe, all the men of which are warriors, polygyny is generally diffused; but in a society compounded of such tribes, polygyny continues to characterize the militant part, while monogamy begins to characterize the industrial part. This differentiation is foreshadowed even in the primitive predatory tribes; since the least militant men fail to obtain more than one wife each. And it becomes marked when, in the growing population, there arises a division between warriors and workers.

Still more clearly shall we see the connection between militancy