It would be an undivided commune, to the former existence of which significant evidence has long seemed to point.
The case of the Ahts, quoted from Sproat's "Scenes and Studies of Savage Life," by Sir John Lubbock,[1] and apparently brought forward by him as an instance of such a tribe, is far from being a case in point. Sproat's account of the Ahts does not prove that tribe to be endogamous, excepting in the sense that a tribe made up of exogamous clans may be said to be endogamous because it prefers not to go beyond its own clans for its wives. If this be endogamy, then the term endogamy is of little value; for in this sense nearly every nation on the face of the earth may be said to be endogamous, in feeling at least. Even among the English the "foreigner" is not looked upon as an altogether eligible husband excepting for princesses, and for them only because of ancient traditions. It is the Calmuck rule over again. The common people may marry at home, but a Derbet noble must marry one of the Torgot stock. One of the good deeds the Queen has done is her breaking through this rule in the case of one of her daughters. And, even if one of her sons had taken an English or an American lady to wife, there is little doubt that the nation would have applauded his choice, in spite of all the old traditions. But this is going a long way from our subject.
What Sproat tells us of the Ahts is that "the idea of slavery connected with capture is so common that a freeborn Aht would hesitate to marry a woman taken in war, whatever her rank had been in her own tribe." And this feeling is a very common one elsewhere. With reference to this passage in the "Origin of Civilization," Mr. Walter Carew, Commissioner for the Interior of Naviti Levu, Feejee, was good enough to write me the following note: "To call a person 'a child of a captive' is a very great insult, even though the mother were of high rank." Mr. Carew goes on to remind me of a case, with the circumstances of which we are both acquainted, of a Viria chief who was set aside because his mother was a captive, though she was a marama, or lady of rank, belonging to one of the principal tribes in Feejee, a tribe of far greater consequence than that of Viria.
Having examined Mr. McLennan's theory of exogamy and marriage by capture, it now remains for us to notice his statement of polyandry.
If what we have to deal with here were no more than a statement that local cases of polyandry are to be found, or even that such cases are of frequent occurrence, the controversy would be of no very great importance. But Mr. McLennan treats polyandry as a system of marriage of so extensive a prevalence, and draws with singular ability such wide inferences from it as to kinship, succession, and the change of descent from the female line to the male, that all the most impor-
- ↑ "Origin of Civilization," p. 117.
