The simplest form of purchase is to give a woman in exchange. "The Australian male almost invariably obtains his wife or wives either as the survivor of a married elder brother or in exchange for his sisters, or, later in life, for his daughters."[142] A wife is also often sold on credit, but kept at home until the price is paid. On the island of Serang a youth belongs to the family of the girl, living according to her customs and religion until the bride-price is paid. He then takes both wife and children to his tribe. But in case he is very poor, he never pays the price, and remains perpetually in the tribe of his wife.[143] Among the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia the maternal has only barely given way to the paternal system, and the form of marriage reflects both systems. The suitor sends a messenger with blankets, and the number sent is doubled within three months, making in all about one hundred and fifty. These are to be returned later. He is then allowed to live with the girl in her father's house. Three months later the husband gives perhaps a hundred blankets more for permission to take his wife home.[144] Among the Makassar and Beginese stems of Indionesia the purchase of a wife involves only a partial relinquishment of the claim of the maternal house on the girl; the purchase price is paid by instalments and all belongs to the mother's kindred in case full payment is not made. A compromise between the two systems is made on the Molucca Islands, where children born before the bride-price is paid belong to the mother's side, after that to the father's.[145]

So long as a wife remained in her group, she could rely upon her kindred for protection against ill-usage from her husband, but she forfeited this advantage when she passed to his group. An Arabian girl replies to her father, when a chief seeks her in marriage: "No! I am not fair of face, and I have infirmities of temper, and I am not his bint'amm (tribeswoman), so that he should respect my consanguinity with him, nor does he dwell in thy country, so that he should have regard for thee; I fear then that he may not care for me and may divorce me, and so I shall be in an evil case."[146] The Hassanyeh Arabs of the White Nile region in Egypt afford a curious example of the conflict of male and female interests in connection with marriage, in which the female passes by contract for only a portion of her time under the authority of the male:

When the parents of the man and woman meet to settle the price of the woman, the price depends on how many days in the week the marriage tie is to be strictly observed. The woman's mother first of all proposes that, taking everything into consideration, with a due regard for the feelings of the family, she could not think of binding her daughter to a due observance of that chastity which matrimony is expected to command for more than two days in the week. After a great deal of apparently angry discussion, and the promise on the part of the relatives of the man to pay more, it is arranged that the marriage shall hold good, as is customary among the first families of the tribe, for four days in the week, viz.: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; and, in compliance with old-established custom, the marriage rites during the three remaining days shall not be insisted on, during which days the bride shall be perfectly free to act as she may think proper, either by adhering to her husband and home, or by enjoying her freedom and independence from all observation of matrimonial obligations.[147]

We may understand also that the tolerance of loose conduct in girls before marriage—a tolerance which amounts in many tribes to approval—is due to the tribal recognition of the value of children, and children born out of marriage are added to the family of the mother. When, on the other hand, the conduct of the girl is strictly watched, this is from a consideration that virgins command a higher bride-price. Child-marriages and long betrothals are means of guaranteeing the proper conduct of a girl to her husband, as they constitute a personal claim and afford him an opportunity to throw more restrictions about her. So that, in any case, the conduct of the girl is viewed with reference to her value to the tribe.

A social grouping which is not the product of forces more active in their nature than the reproductive force may be expected to yield before male motor activities, when these are for any reason sufficiently formulated. The primitive warrior and hunter comes into honor and property through a series of movements involving judgments of time and space, and the successful direction of force, aided by mechanical appliances and mediated through the hand and the eye. Whether directed against the human or the animal world, the principle is the same; success and honor and influence in tribal life depend on the application of violence at the proper time, in the right direction, and in sufficient measure; and this is pre-eminently the business of the male. The advantage of acting in concert in war and hunting, and under the leadership of those who have shown evidence of the best judgment in these matters, is felt in any body of men who are held together by any tie; and the first tie is the tie of blood, by which we should understand, not that primitive man has any sentimental feeling about kinship, but that he is psychologically inseparable from those among whom he was born and with whom he has to do. Though the father's sense of kinship and interest in his children is originally feeble, it increases with the growth of consciousness in connection with various activities, and, at the point in race development when chieftainship is hereditary in the clan and personal property is recognized, the father realizes the awkwardness of a social system which reckons his children as members of another clan and forces him to bequeath his rank and possessions to his sister's children, or other members of his own group, rather than to his children. The Navajoes[148] and Nairs,[149] and ancient Egyptians[150] avoided this unpleasant condition by giving their property to their children during their own lifetime; and the Shawnees, Miamis, Sauks, and Foxes avoided it by naming the children into the clan of the father, giving a child a tribal name being equivalent to adoption.[151] The cleverest bit of primitive politics of which we have record is the device employed in ancient Peru, and surviving in historical times in Egypt and elsewhere in the East, by which the ruler married his own sister, contrary to the exogamous practice of the common folk. The children might then be regularly reckoned as of the kin of the mother, indeed, but they were at the same time of and in the group of the father, and the king secured the succession of his own son by marrying the woman whose son would traditionally succeed.

As we should expect, the desirability of modifying the system of descent and inheritance through females is felt first in connection with situations of honor and profit. At the time of the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands the government was a brutal despotism, presenting many of the features of feudalism; the people prostrated themselves before the king and before objects which he had touched, and a man suffered death whose shadow fell upon the king, or who went uncovered within the shadow of the king's house, or even looked upon the king by day.[152] But descent was in the female line, with a tendency to transfer to the male line in case of the king, and among chiefs, priests, and nobility.[153] This assertion of the male authority was sometimes resented, however, and was a source of frequent trouble. Wilkes states that there was formerly no regularly established order of succession to the throne; the children of the chief wife had the best claim, but the king often named his own successor, and this gave rise to violent conflicts.[154]

Blood-brotherhood, blood-vengeance, secret societies, tribal marks (totemism, circumcision, tattooing, scarification), and religious dedication are devices by which, consciously or unconsciously, the men escape from the tyranny of the maternal system. We cannot assume that these practices originate solely or largely in dissatisfaction, for the men would feel the advantage of a combination of interests whenever brought into association with one another; but these artificial bonds and their display to the eye are among the first attempts to synthetize the male forces of the group, and it is quite apparent that such unions are unfavorable to the continuance of the influence of women and of the system which they represent. In West Africa and among some of the negro tribes the initiatory ceremony is apparently deliberately hostile to the maternal organization. The youth is taken from the family of his mother, symbolically killed and buried, resurrected by the priests into a male organization, and dedicated to his father's god.[155]

Spatial conditions have played an important role also in the development of societies. Through movements the individual or the group is able to pick and choose advantageous relations, and by changing its location adjust itself to changes in the food conditions. That the success of the group is definitely related to its motor capacity is revealed by the following law of population, worked out by statisticians for the three predominant races of modern Europe: In countries inhabited jointly by these three races, the race possessing the smallest portion of wealth and the smallest representation among the more influential and educated classes constitutes also the least migratory element of the population, and tends in the least degree to concentrate in the cities and the more fertile regions of the country; and in countries inhabited jointly by the three races, the race possessing the largest portion of wealth and the largest representation among the more influential and educated classes is also the most migratory element of the population, and tends in the greatest degree to concentrate in the cities and the more fertile portions of the country.[156] The primitive movements of population necessitated by climatic change, geological disturbances, the failure of water or exhaustion of the sources of food, were occasions for the expression of the superior motor disposition of the male and for the dislodgment of the female from her position of advantage.

We know that the migrations of the natural races are necessary and frequent, and the movements of the culture races have been even more complex. The leadership of these mass-movements and spatial reaccommodations necessarily rests with the men, who, in their wanderings, have become acquainted with larger stretches of space; and whose specialty is motor co-ordination. The progressive races have managed the space problem best. At every favorable point they have pushed out their territorial boundaries or transferred their social activities to a region more favorable to their expansion. Under male leadership, in consequence, territory has always become the prize in every conflict of races; the modern state is based not on blood but on territory, and territory is at present the reigning political ideal.

In the process of coming into control of a larger environment through the motor activities of the male, the group comes into collision with other groups within which the same movement is going on, and it then becomes a question which group can apply force more destructively and remove or bring under control this human portion of its environment. Military organization and battle afford the grand opportunity for the individual and mass expression of the superior force-capacity of the male. They also determine experimentally which groups and which individuals are superior in this respect, and despotism, caste, slavery, and the subjection of women are concrete expressions of the trial.

The nominal headship of woman within the maternal group existed only in default of forms of activity fit to formulate headship among the men, and when chronic militancy developed an organization among the males, the political influence of the female was completely shattered. At a certain point in history women became an unfree class, precisely as slaves became an unfree class—because neither class showed a superior fitness on the motor side; and each class is regaining its freedom because the race is substituting other forms of decision for violence.



SEX AND SOCIAL FEELING

An examination of the early habits of man and an analysis of the instincts which persist in him show that he has been essentially a predaceous animal, fighting his way up at every step of the struggle for existence. It therefore becomes a point of considerable interest to determine what influences have contributed to soften his behavior and make it possible for him to dwell in harmony and co-operation with large groups of his fellows.

We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready to burst at any moment into flame, the smouldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.... If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting and the chasing instincts must have become ingrained. Certain perceptions must immediately, and without the intervention of inferences and ideas, have prompted emotions and motor discharges; and both the latter must, from the nature of the case, have been very violent, and therefore when unchecked of an intensely pleasurable

kind. It is just because bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised as a part of the fun.... No! those who try to account for this from above downwards, as if it resulted from the consequences of the victory being rapidly inferred, and from the agreeable sensations associated with them in the imagination, have missed the root of the matter. Our ferocity is blind and can only be explained from below. Could we trace it back through our lines of descent, we should see it taking more and more the form of a fatal reflex response, and at the same time becoming more and more the pure and direct emotion that it is.[157]

If we examine, in fact, our pleasures and pains, our moments of elation and depression, we find that they go back for the most part to instincts developed in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates. We can perhaps best get at the meaning of the conflict interest to the organism in terms of the significance to itself or the organism's own movements. Locomotion, of whatever type, is primarily to enable the animal to reach and grasp food, and also to escape other animals bent on finding food. The structure of the organism has been built up gradually through the survival of the most efficient structures. Corresponding with a structure mechanically adapted to successful movements, there is developed on the psychic side an interest in the conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the structure itself. The emotional states are, indeed, organic preparations for action, corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or retreat, and a connection has even been made out between pleasurable states and the extensor muscles, and painful states and the flexor muscles. We can have no adequate idea of the time consumed and the experiments made in nature before the development of these types of structure and interest of the conflict pattern, but we know from the geological records that the time and experiments were long and many, and the competition so sharp, that finally, not in man alone, but in all the higher classes of animals, body and mind, structure and interest, were working perfectly in motor actions of the violent type involved in a life of conflict, competition, and rivalry. There could not have been developed an organism depending on offensive and defensive movements for food and life without an interest in what we call a dangerous or precarious situation. A type without this interest would have been defective, and would have dropped out in the course of development.

There has been comparatively little change in human structure or human interest in historical times. It is a popular view that moral and cultural views and interests have superseded our animal instincts; but the cultural period is only a span in comparison with prehistoric times and the prehuman period of life, and it seems probable that types of psychic reaction were once for all developed and fixed; and while objects of attention and interest in different historical periods are different, we shall never get far away from the original types of stimulus and reaction. It is, indeed, a condition of normal life that we should not get too far away from them.

The fact that our interests and enthusiasms are called out in situations of the conflict type is shown by a glance at the situations which arouse them most readily. War is simply an organized form of fight, and as such is most attractive, or, to say the least, arouses the interests powerfully. With the accumulation of property, and the growth of sensibility and intelligence, it becomes apparent that war is a wasteful and unsafe process, and public and personal interests lead us to avoid it as much as possible. But, however genuinely war may be deprecated, it is certainly an exciting game. The Rough Riders in this country recently, and more recently the young men of the aristocracy of England, went to war from motives of patriotism, no doubt; but there are unmistakable evidences that they also regarded it as the greatest sport they were likely to have a chance at in a lifetime. And there is evidence in plenty that the emotional attitude of women toward war is no less intense. Grey[158] relates that half a dozen old women among the Australians will drive the men to war with a neighboring tribe over a fancied injury. The Jewish maidens went out with music and dancing, and sang that Saul had slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands. Two American women who passed through the horrors of the siege of Pekin were, on their return, given a reception by their friends, and the daily press reported that they exhibited among other trophies "a Boxer's sword with the blood still on the blade, which was taken from the body of a Boxer killed by the legation guards; and a Boxer spear with which a native Christian girl was struck down in Legation Street." It is not necessary to regard as morbid or vulgar the action of these ladies in bringing home reminders of their peril. On the contrary, it is a sign of continued animal health and instinct in the race to feel deep interest in perilous situations and pleasure in their revival in consciousness.

"Unaccommodated man" was, to begin with, in relations more hostile than friendly. The struggle for food was so serious a fact, and predaceousness to such a degree the habit of life, that a suspicious, hostile, and hateful state of mind was the rule, with exceptions only in the cases where truce, association, and alliance had come about in the course of experience. This was still the state of affairs in so advanced a stage of development as the Indian society of North America, where a tribe was in a state of war with every tribe with which it had not made a treaty of peace; and it is perhaps true, generally speaking, of men today, that they regard others with a degree of distrust and aversion until they have proved themselves good fellows. What, indeed, would be the fate of a man on the streets of a city if he did otherwise? There has, nevertheless, grown up an intimate relation between man and certain portions of his environment; and this includes, not only his wife and children, his dog and his blood-brother, but, with lessening intensity, the members of his clan, tribe, and nation. These become, psychologically speaking, a portion of himself, and stand with him against the world at large. From the standpoint here outlined, prejudice or its analogue is the starting-point, and our question becomes one of the determination of the steps of the process by which man mentally allied with himself certain portions of his environment to the exclusion of others.

If we look for an explanation of the hostility which a group feels for another group, and of the sympathy which its members feel for one another, we may first of all inquire whether there are any conditions arising in the course of the biological development of a species which, aside from social activities, lead to a predilection for those of one's own kind and a prejudice against different groups. And we do, in fact, find such conditions. The earliest movements of animal life involve, in the rejection of stimulations vitally bad, an attitude which is the analogue of prejudice. On the principle of chemiotaxis, the micro-organism will approach a particle of food placed in the water and shun a particle of poison; and its movements are similarly controlled by heat, light, electricity, and other tropic forces.[159] The development of animal life from this point upward consists in the growth of structure and organs of sense adapted to discriminate between different stimulations, to choose between the beneficial and prejudicial, and to obtain in this way a more complete control of the environment. Passing over the lower forms of animal life, we find in the human type the power of attention, memory, and comparison highly developed, so that an estimate is put on stimulations and situations correspondent with the bearing of stimulations or situations of this type on welfare in the past. The choice and rejection involved in this process are accompanied by organic changes (felt as emotions) designed to assist in the action which follows a decision.[160] Both the judgment and the emotions are thus involved in the presentation to the senses of a situation or object involving possible advantage or hurt, pleasure or pain. It consequently transpires that the feelings called out on the presentation of disagreeable objects and their contrary are very different, and there arise in this connection fixed mental attitudes corresponding with fixed or habitually recurrent external situations—hate and love, prejudice and predilection—answering to situations which revive feelings of pain on the one hand, and feelings of pleasure on the other. And such is the working of suggestion that, not alone an object or situation may produce a given state of feeling, but a voice, an odor, a color, or any characteristic sign of an object may produce the same effect as the object itself. The sight or smell of blood is an excitant to a bull, because it revives a conflict state of feeling, and even the color of a red rag produces a similar effect.

When we come to examine in detail the process by which an associational and sympathetic relation is set up between the individual and certain parts of the outside world to the exclusion of others, we find this at first, on a purely instinctive and reflex basis, originating in connection with food-getting and reproduction, and growing more conscious in the higher forms of life. One of the most important origins of association and prepossession is seen in the relation of parents, particularly of mothers, to children. This begins, of course, among the lower animals. The mammalian class, in particular, is distinguished by the strength and persistence of the devotion of parents to offspring. The advantage secured by the form of reproduction characteristic of man and the other mammals is that a closer connection is secured between the child and the mother. By the intra-uterine form of reproduction the association of mother and offspring is set up in an organic way before the birth of the latter, and is continued and put on a social basis during the period of lactation and the early helpless years of the child. By continuing the helpless period of the young for a period of years, nature has made provision on the time side for a complex physical and mental type, impossible in types thrown at birth on their own resources. Along with the structural modification of the female on account of the intra-uterine form of reproduction and the effort of nature to secure a more complex type and a better chance of survival, there is a corresponding development of the sentiments, and maternal feeling, in particular, is developed as the subjective condition necessary to carrying out the plan of giving the infant a prolonged period of helplessness and play through which its faculties are developed.[161] The scheme would not work if the mother were not more interested in the child than in anything else in the world. In the course of development every variational tendency in mothers to dote on their children was rewarded by the survival of these children, and the consequent survival of the stock, owing to better nutrition, protection, and training. Of course, this inherited interest in children is shared by the males of the group also, though not in the same degree, and there is reason to believe also that the interest of the male parent in children is acquired in a great degree indirectly and socially through his more potent desire to associate with the mother.

This interest and providence on the score of offspring has also a characteristic expression on the mental side. All sense-perceptions are colored and all judgments biased where the child is in question, and affection for it extends to the particular marks which distinguish it. Not only its physical features, but its dress and little shoes, its toys and everything it has touched take on a peculiar aspect.

On the organic side, therefore, there is developed a tendency, both in connection with reactions to stimulations in general and in connection with reproductive life in particular, to seize on particular aspects and to be obsessed by them to the exclusion or disparagement of other aspects. The feelings of love and hate, and the broader feelings of race-prejudice and patriotism are consequently based first of all in the instincts.

Perhaps the most particular and interesting expression of the general fact of susceptibility is seen in the sensitiveness of man to the opinion in which he is held by others. Social life in every stage of society is characterized by an eagerness to make a striking effect. A bare reference to the ethnological facts in this connection will suffice: The Kite Indians have a society of young men so brave and so ostentatious of their bravery that they will not fight from cover nor turn aside to avoid running into an ambuscade or a hole in the ice. The African has the privilege of cutting a gash six inches long in his thigh for every man he has killed. The Melanesian who is planning revenge sets up a stick or stone where it can be seen; he refuses to eat, and stays away from the dance; he sits silent in the council and answers questions by whistling and by other signs draws attention to himself and has it understood that he is a brave and dangerous man, and that he is biding his time.[162]

This bidding for the good opinion of others has plainly a connection with food-getting, and with the conflict side of life. High courage is praised and valued by society, and a man of courage is less imposed on by others, and comes in for substantial recognition and the favor of women. It is thus of advantage to act in such a way as to get public approval and some degree of appreciation; and a degree of sensibility on the score of the opinion of others, or at least a reckoning upon this, is involved in the process of personal adjustment.

But the problem of personal adjustment at this point would seem to call for more of intelligence than emotion; and we find, on the contrary, an excess of sensibility and a mania for being well thought of hardly to be explained as originating in the exigencies of tribal organization, nor yet on the score of its service to the individual in getting his food and living out his life. Why could not primitive man live in society, be of the war-parties, plan ambuscades, develop his fighting technique and gear, be a blood-brother to another man, show his trophies, set a high value on his personality, and insist on recognition and respect, without this almost pathological dependence on the praise and blame of others?

Or if we approach the question from another standpoint and inspect our states of consciousness, we find signs that we have a greater fund of sensibility than is justified in immediate activity. We have the same mania to be well thought of; we are unduly interested when we hear that others have been talking about us; we are annoyed, even furious, at a slight criticism, and are childishly delighted by a compliment (without regard to our deserts); and children and adults alike understand how to put themselves forward and get notice, and equally well how to get notice by withdrawing themselves and staying away or out of a game. We have a tendency to show off which is not apparently genetically connected with exploit or organization, and we recognize that this form of vanity is not consistent with the ordinary run of our activities when we argue with ourselves that the opinion of this or that person is of no consequence and attempt to think ourselves into a state of indifference. Intellectually and deliberately our attitude toward criticism from others would often be, if we could choose, represented by Tweed's query: "What are you going to do about it?" But actually it puts us to bed.

All of this seems to indicate that there is an element in sensibility not accounted for on the exploit or food side, and this element is, I believe, genetically connected with sexual life. Unlike the struggle for existence in the ordinary sense of the phrase, the courtship of the sexes presents a situation in which an appeal is made for the favor of another personality, and the success of this appeal has a survival value—not for the individual, but for the species through the individual. We have, in fact, a situation in which the good opinion of another is vitally important. On this account the means of attracting and interesting others are definitely and bountifully developed among all the higher species of animals. Voice, plumage, color, odor, and movement are powerful excitants in wooing and aids both to the conquest of the female and the attraction of the male. In this connection we must also recognize the fact that reproductive life must be connected with violent stimulation, or it would be neglected and the species would become extinct; and, on the other hand, if the conquest of the female were too easy, sexual life would be in danger of becoming a play interest and a dissipation, destructive of energy and fatal to the species. Working, we may assume, by a process of selection and survival, nature has both secured and safeguarded reproduction. The female will not submit to seizure except in a high state of nervous excitation (as is seen especially well in the wooing of birds), while the male must conduct himself in such a way as to manipulate the female; and, as the more active agent, he develops a marvelous display of technique for this purpose. This is offset by the coyness and coquetry of the female, by which she equally attracts and fascinates the male and practices upon him to induce a corresponding state of nervous excitation.[163]

This is the only situation in the life of the lower animals, at any rate, where the choice of another is vitally important; and corresponding with the elaborate technique to secure this choice we have in wooing pleasure-pain reactions of a violent character. In a word, extreme sensitiveness to the judgment of another answers on the subjective side to technique for the conquest of a member of the opposite sex. It seems, therefore, that we are justified in concluding that our vanity and susceptibility have their origin largely in sexual life, and that, in particular, our susceptibility to the opinion of others and our dependence on their good will are genetically referable to sexual life.

This view would be completely substantiated if we could show that the qualities of vanity and susceptibility in question are present in any species where it is impossible to assume that they were developed in connection with the struggle for food and as the result of the survival of types showing a tendency to combine and co-operate in the effort to get food. And we do, in fact, have cases of this kind among some of the lower animals. It cannot be said that the dog, for instance, has survived in the struggle for existence because of his sensitiveness to public opinion in his species nor on account of an interest in being well thought of by the community of dogs at large which would lead him to behave in a public-spirited or moral manner. At the same time, the dog in his relation to man shows as keen a sensitiveness to man's opinion and treatment as does man himself. The attention which the master pays to one dog will almost break the heart of a dog not receiving it. A neglected dog plainly suffers as much in his way as the soldier who is sent to Coventry by his messmates; and if neglected and jealous dogs do not commit suicide, as they are reported to do, they are evidently in a state of mind to do so. This means that the dog has highly developed susceptibility to the appreciation of others, and that the species which he represents has had no history except a sexual history capable of developing this mental attitude. In connection with courtship he developed a fund of organic susceptibility, and this condition is involved in his more general relation to man; the machinery set up in sexual relations is played on by stimuli in general. A condition favorable to stimuli of a particular kind is favorable to stimuli in general; and it seems likely that this not very prominent fact of a state of excitation in a sexual connection is an important factor in the formation of the mind and of society.

There are also certain conditions in the development of the individual and of society where the sexual type of reaction is so near the surface that it shows through in connection with political, moral, and other essentially non-sexual activities. Passing over the fact that the period of adolescence is noticeably a period of "susceptibility" and personal vanity, we may take as an example of the intrusion or persistence of the sexual element in conditions of a non-sexual kind the frequent association of sexual with religious excitement.[164] The appeal made during a religious revival to an unconverted person has psychologically some resemblance to the attempt of the male to overcome the hesitancy of the female. In each case the will has to be set aside, and strong suggestive means are used; and in both cases the appeal is not of the conflict type, but of an intimate, sympathetic, and pleading kind. In the effort to make a moral adjustment, it consequently turns out that a technique is used which was derived originally from sexual life, and the use, so to speak, of the sexual machinery for a moral adjustment involves, in some cases, the carrying over into the general process of some sexual manifestations. The emotional forms used and the emotional states aroused are not entirely stripped of their sexual content.

On the race side, also, there is a stage in development where the sexual pattern is transferred almost unmodified to public affairs. The following extracts from a lengthy description given by Mr. Bowdich of his reception by the king of Ashanti, in the year 1817, will illustrate sufficiently the employment of the turkey-cock pattern of activity in political relations:

The sun was reflected with a glare scarcely more supportable than the heat from massive gold ornaments which glistened in every direction. More than a hundred bands burst at once on our arrival, with the peculiar airs of their several chiefs; the horns flourished their defiances, with the beating of innumerable drums and metal instruments, and then yielded for a while to the soft breathings of their long flutes.... At least a hundred large umbrellas or canopies, which could shelter thirty persons, were sprung up and down by the bearers with brilliant effect, being made of scarlet, yellow, and the most showy cloths and silks, and crowned on the top with crescents, pelicans, elephants, barrels, and arms and swords of gold.... The caboceers, as did their superior captains, and attendants, wore Ashanti cloths of extravagant price, from the costly foreign silks which had been unravelled to weave them in all the varieties of color as well as pattern: they were of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder exactly like the Roman toga; a small silk fillet generally encircled their temples, and many gold necklaces, intricately wrought, suspended Moorish charms, dearly purchased, and enclosed in small square cases of gold, silver, and curious embroidery. Some wore necklaces reaching to the waist, entirely of aggry beads; a band of gold and beads encircled the knee, from which several strings of the same depended; small circlets of gold, like guineas, rings, and casts of animals were strung round their ankles; their sandals were of green, red and delicate white leather; manillas, and rude lumps of rock gold hung from their left wrists, which were so heavily laden as to be supported on the head of one of their handsomest boys.... [The king] wore a fillet of aggry beads round his temples, a necklace of gold cockspur shells strung by their larger ends, and over his right shoulder a red silk cord, suspending three sapphires cased in gold; his bracelets were of the richest mixtures of beads and gold, and his fingers covered with rings; his cloth was of a dark green silk, a pointed diadem was elegantly painted in white on his forehead; also a pattern resembling an epaulette on each shoulder, and an ornament like a full blown rose, one leaf rising above another until it covered his whole breast.... The belts of the guards behind his chair were cased in gold, and covered with small jaw-bones of the same metal; the elephants' tails, waving like a small cloud before him, were spangled with gold, and large plumes of feathers were flourished among them. His eunuch presided over these attendants, wearing only one massive piece of gold about his neck; the royal stool, entirely cased in gold, was displayed under a splendid umbrella, with drums, sankos, horns, and various musical instruments, cased in gold, about the thickness of cartridge paper; large circles of gold hung by scarlet cloth from the swords of state;... hatchets of the same were intermixed with them; the breasts of the Ochras and various attendants were adorned with large stars, stools, crescents, and gossamer wings of solid gold.[165]

It is not surprising that the characteristically sexual method of display and emotional appeal should be associated with the earlier efforts at adjustment, both in the individual and in the state. This method is based on the instincts, and just as inhibition and brain legislation follow the instincts in point of development, a rational mode of control, individual and public, is developed later than the emotional form, or, at any rate, is not at first independent of it.

The origin of mental impressionability seems to lie then, not in one, but in the two general regions of activity—that connected with the struggle for food and that connected with reproduction. The strain on the attention in the food and conflict side of life involves the development of mental impressionability, particularly of an impressionability on the side of cognition. But in addition we have the impressionability growing out of sexual life which has been in question above, and which is more closely related to appreciation than to cognition. And of these two aspects of impressionability—the one growing out of conflict and the one growing out of reproduction—the latter has more social possibilities than the former, because it implies a sympathetic rather than an antagonistic organic attitude. It is certainly in virtue of susceptibility to the opinion of others that society works—through public opinion, fashion, tradition, reproof, encouragement, precept, and doctrine—to bring the individual under control and make him a member of society; and it is doubtful whether this could have been accomplished if a peculiar attitude of responsiveness to opinion had not arisen in sexual relations, reinforcing the more general and cognitive impressionability. Without this capacity to be influenced the individual would be in the condition of the hardened criminal, and society would be impossible.

This sex-susceptibility, which was originally developed as an accessory of reproduction and had no social meaning whatever, has thus, in the struggle of society to obtain a hold on the individual, become a social factor of great importance, and together with another product of sexual life—the love of offspring—it is, I suspect, the most immediate source of our sympathetic attitudes in general, and an important force in the development of the ideal, moral, and aesthetic sides of life.

Morality, sympathy, and altruism are of tribal origin, and have their roots in (1) the love of offspring, (2) the sensitivity connected with courtship, and (3) the comradeship which arises among men in prosecuting vital interests in common. The history of society on the moral and aesthetic sides is in great part the history of the attempt to make the sympathetic attitude prevail over the more antagonistic. But how far we are still short of this, and how far our sympathy and morality are still tribal and even familial, is indicated by the persistence of race-prejudice and of that

lust in man no charm can tame Of loudly publishing our neighbor's shame.



SEX AND PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY

Labor represents the expenditure of energy in securing food, and in making the food-process constant and sure; and we may well expect to find that the somatological differences shown to exist between man and woman will be found reflected in the labors of primitive society.

An examination of the ethnological facts shows that among the primitive races men are engaged in activities requiring strength, violence, speed, and the craft and foresight which follow from the contacts and strains of their more motor life; and the slow, unspasmodic, routine, stationary occupations are the part of woman. Animal life is itself motor, elusive, and violent, and both by disposition and of necessity man's attention and activities are devoted first of all to the animal process. It is the most stimulating and dangerous portion of his environment, and affords the most immediate and concrete reward.

Contrasted with this violent and intermittent activity of man, we find with equal uniformity that the attention of woman is directed principally to the vegetable environment. Man's attention to hunting and fighting, and woman's attention to agriculture and attendant stationary industries, is so generally a practice of primitive society that we may well infer the habit is based on a physiological difference. An explanation of exceptions to the rule, and the departure from it in the later life of the race, we shall have to seek in changes in the social habits of the race.

The old observation, that "woman was first a beast of burden, then a domestic animal, then a slave, then a servant, and last of all a minor," represents the usual view of the condition of woman taken by early missionaries and travelers. This view is, as we shall see, out of focus, but there is no doubt that the labors of early woman were exacting, incessant, varied, and hard, and that, if a catalogue of primitive forms of labor were made, woman would be found doing five things where man did one.

An Australian of the Kurnai tribe once said to Fison: "A man hunts, spears fish, fights, and sits about;"[166] and this is a very good general statement of the male activities of primitive society the world over, if we add one other activity—the manufacture of weapons. On the other hand, Bonwick's statement of the labors of Tasmanian women is a typical one:

In addition to the necessary duty of looking after the children, they had to provide all the food for the household excepting that derived from the chase of the kangaroo. They climbed up hills for the opossum, delved in the ground with their sticks for yams, native bread, and nutritive roots, groped about the rocks for shellfish, dived beneath the sea for oysters, and fished for the finny tribe. In addition to this, they carried, on their frequent tramps, the household stuff in native baskets of their own manufacture. Their affectionate partners would even pile upon their burdens sundry spears and waddies not required for present service, and would command their help to rear the breakwind, and to raise the fire. They acted, moreover, as cooks to the establishment, and were occasionally regaled, at the termination of a feast, with the leavings of their gorged masters.[167]

Among the Andamanese, while the men go into the jungle to hunt pigs, the women fetch drinking water and firewood, catch shellfish, make fishing nets and baskets, spin thread, and cook the food ready for the return of the men.[168] In New Caledonia "girls work in the plantations, boys learn to fight."[169] In Africa the case is similar. Among the Bushmen (to take only one example from this continent) the woman "weaves the frail mats and rushes under which her family finds a little shelter from the wind and from the heat of the sun," constructs a fireplace of three round stones, fashions and bakes a few earthenware pots. When her household labors are done, she gathers roots, locusts, etc., from the fields. On the march she frequently carries a child, a mat, an earthen pot, some ostrich eggshells, and "a few ragged skins bundled on her head or shoulder," while the man carries only his spear, bow, and quiver.[170] The conditions among the American Indians were practically the same. Cotton Mather said of the Indians of Massachusetts: "The men are most abominably slothful, making their poor squaws or wives to plant, and dress, and barn, and beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them;"[171] and Jones, referring to the women of southern tribes, says:

Doomed to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position to which woman is always consigned where civilization and religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden, busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets, moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ground, a nurse for her own children, and at all times a servant to the commands and passions of the stronger sex.[172]

Primitive woman was therefore undoubtedly very busy, but I have seen no reason to believe that she considered her condition unfortunate. Our great-grandmothers were also very busy, but they were apparently not discontented. There was no reason why woman should not labor in primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor were expressions of later social conditions. Speaking largely, these considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women, and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men. It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth.

The exemption of women from labor, in short, implied an economic surplus which early society did not possess. The lower classes of modern society do not possess it either, and there the women are still "drudges," if we want to use that word about a situation which is normal, in view of the economic condition of the men and women concerned. It was necessary that primitive society, in the absence of elaborate machinery for doing things, in unstable and precarious food conditions, and without resources accumulated from preceding generations, should utilize all its forces. The struggle for existence, in its harshest sense, was but little mitigated, and no group could have spared at all the industry of women. Even if primitive life had been as hard as Hobbes would have it, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," mere negative, habitual hardness and miserableness of condition did not get the attention of primitive society particularly. Their life was hard, as we look at it, not as they looked at it. They could not compare themselves with the future, and comparisons with the past were doubtless in their favor. The best returns from activity will of course follow when each individual is doing something he is specially well fitted to do, and natural selection seems to have seen to it that primitive society should so divide the labor as best to utilize social energy by assigning to men the tasks requiring violent exertion, and to women those requiring constant attention.

But was not primitive man very lazy, and did he not do fewer things than he reasonably could have done? If we mean by lazy an aversion to certain types of action, primitive man was doubtless lazy; but if we mean an aversion to all kinds of exertion, he certainly was not lazy. He was so thoroughly aroused by certain stimulations and so exhausted by the expenditure of energy in reacting to these stimulations that periods of recuperation, or "sitting about," were necessary. Heckenwelder's remarks on the labor of men and women among the Indians of Pennsylvania are very instructive, although they relate to tribes which had come under white influences to some extent:

The work of the women is not hard or difficult. They are both able and willing to do it, and always perform it with cheerfulness. Mothers teach their daughters those duties which common sense would otherwise point out to them when grown up. Within doors their labor is very trifling; there is seldom more than one pot or kettle to attend to. There is no scrubbing of the house, and but little to wash, and that not often. Their principal occupations are to cut and fetch in the firewood, till the ground, sow and reap the grain, and pound the corn in mortars for their pottage, and to make bread which they bake in the ashes. When going on a journey or to hunting camps with their husbands, if they have no horses, they carry a pack on their backs which often appears heavier than it really is; it generally consists of a blanket, a dressed deer skin for moccasins, a few articles of kitchen furniture, as a kettle, bowl, or dish, with spoons, and some bread, corn, salt, etc., for their nourishment. I have never known an Indian woman complain of the hardship of carrying this burden, which serves for their own comfort and support as well as of their husbands. The tilling of the ground at home, getting of firewood, and pounding of corn in mortars, is frequently done by female parties, much in the manner of those husking, quilting, and other frolics (as they are called) in some parts of the United States.... [When accompanying her husband on the hunt the woman] takes pains to dry as much meat as she can, that none may be lost; she carefully puts the tallow up, assists in drying the skins, gathers as much wild hemp as possible for the purpose of making strings, carrying bands, bags, and other necessary articles; collects roots for dyeing; in short, does everything in her power to leave no care to her husband but the important one of providing meat for the family. After all, the fatigue of the women is by no means to be compared to that of the men. Their hard and difficult employments are periodical and of short duration, while their husbands' labors are constant and severe in the extreme. Were a man to take upon himself a part of his wife's duty, in addition to his own, he must necessarily sink under the load, and of course his family must suffer with him. On his exertions as a hunter their existence depends; in order to be able to follow that rough employment with success, he must keep his limbs as supple as he can, he must avoid hard labor as much as possible, that his joints may not become stiffened, and that he may preserve the necessary strength and agility of body to enable him to pursue the chase, and bear the unavoidable hardships attendant on it; for the fatigues of hunting wear out the body and constitution far more than manual labor. Neither creeks nor rivers, whether shallow or deep, frozen or free from ice, must be an obstacle to the hunter when in pursuit of a wounded deer, bear, or other animal, as is often the case. Nor has he then leisure to think on the state of his body, and to consider whether his blood is not too much heated to plunge without danger into the cold stream, since the game he is in pursuit of is running off from him with full speed. Many dangerous accidents often befall him both as a hunter and a warrior (for he is both), and are seldom unattended with painful consequences, such as rheumatism or consumption of the lungs, for which the sweat-house, on which they so much depend, and to which they often resort for relief, especially after a fatiguing hunt or warlike excursion, is not always a sure preservative or effectual remedy.[173]

The male and female come together by sexual attraction, and the chances of life are increased through association which permits each to do that class of things which by reason of its somatic habit it can do most effectively. Man's exploits were, however, of a more striking and sensational character, appealed to the emotions more, and secured the attention and the admiration of the public more, than the "drudgery" of the woman. The unusual esteem given by society to the destructive activities of the male can be very well understood in connection with a reference to the emotions. The emotions of anger, fear, and joy, to take only these examples, represent a physiological change in the organism in the presence of dangerous situations. Anger is a physiological preparation to resist, to crush a dangerous object; fear is an organic expression of inadequacy to avert the danger; and joy, in one of its aspects, is an organic revulsion answering to the recognition of the fact that the danger is safely passed. The same type of situation incessantly recurring in the life of the race, and constantly met by the same organic changes, has resulted in a fixed relation of certain types of situation to certain types of emotion.

The forms of activity recognized first of all in the consciousness of the race as virtuous are simply those which successfully avert danger and secure safety. Courage, intrepidity, endurance, skill, sagacity, an indomitable spirit, and a willingness to die in fight, are virtues of the first importance, vitally indispensable to the society in conflict with man and beast, and they are virtues of which man is by his organic constitution, by the very fact of his capacity for the rapid destruction of energy, particularly capable. Man's exploits, therefore, first of all had social attention.

The occupations of women were not of an emotional type, and, apart from sexual life, they got their excitements as spectators and approvers of the motor activities of the men. The Hebrew girls who went out with harps and timbrels to meet a victorious army, and sang that Saul had slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands, represent the relation between mighty deeds and social attention and approval. Thus the attention which the organism gives to situations of danger, through violent physiological readjustments fitted to meet the situation, has a parallel in the attention given by society to social means of meeting situations dangerous to the common life and welfare. We have a very plain continuance of the primitive appreciation of the virtues of violence in the worship of military men nowadays, and it is significant, also, that the appreciation of the fighting quality still reaches its most animated expression in women—the sex constitutionally most in need of social protection. It can hardly be denied, therefore, that man both enjoyed this exciting kind of performance more than the labors which women were connected with, and that the women justified him (if we assume that they passed any judgment on his conduct at all) in refraining from doing many things which he could have done perfectly well without constitutional hurt.

The abundance of the labors of primitive woman seems to be accounted for further by the fact that a stationary life is the condition of a greater variety of industrial expressions than a life inclined to motor expressions. It is notorious that a wandering life is not favorable to the development of industries. Industries, in their very nature, handle and shape stationary stuffs, for the most part, and woman developed the constructive or industrial activities as a simple consequence of her more stationary condition of life. The formation of habit is largely a matter of attention, and the attention of woman being limited by her bodily habit and the presence of children to objects lying closer at hand, her energies found expression in connection with these objects.

First of all, the house was identified with woman. The home was, in its simplest terms, the place where the wandering male rejoined the female. It was a cave, or a hollow tree, or a frail structure. It was sought or made with reference to safety and comfort, particularly with reference to the comfort of the young. Recognizing the greater interest of the woman in the child, it is evident that shelter was a more important consideration to her than to the man. The house is, indeed, a very fit accompaniment of the stationary habit of woman, and usually we find the most primitive tribes recognizing her greater interest in it. Even when the houses are built by men, they are generally owned by the women. Man as a solitary animal might, of course, make himself a shelter, but he had a particular interest in being about the shelter of woman, and it was under her shelter, after all, that children were born and that society accumulated numbers. This resulted in the maternal system and the recognition of woman as the head of the household, and the owner of the house. So, when the Indian squaw carries the wigwam on the march, she is carrying her private property and one of her own particular appurtenances. Contrary to the phrase which I quoted above, man is rather, in the sense in which I am now speaking, the domesticated animal. He has been inducted into the family. The estufas of the Pueblo Indians and the men's clubhouses in Africa represent the failure of men to assimilate completely in a society which was essentially female in its genius, and the club still stands for a difference in interest between the male and the female.

From the house, or shelter, as a base, woman got such connections with food as she might. For it is an error to suppose that she was in the most primitive times entirely dependent on man for food. She appears to have been quite as active in developing food surroundings in her way as man was in his. The plant world gave her the best returns for the effort which she could make. She beat out the seeds of plants, digged out the roots and tubers which the monkeys and pigs were seen to grub for most eagerly,[174] strained the poisonous juices from the cassava and made bread of the residue, and it was under her attention that a southern grass was developed into what we know as Indian corn. Looking back on this process, we call it the domestication of plants, and we are likely to regard it as a more conscious process than it really was. It was the result of her conversion to her own uses of the most available portion of her environment. In view of her physiological habit, the animal environment was, for the most part, out of the question, and her attention was of necessity directed to the plant side. While less remunerative in its beginnings than the animal side of the process, it was, perhaps, at all times less precarious and uncertain, and we find in consequence that the economic dependence of man on woman is as evident as her dependence on him. A dinner of herbs is a humbler resort than a roast of antelope, but there was less doubt that it would be forthcoming, and primitive man was often, when in hard luck, dependent on the activities of his wife, or the females of the group.

The domestication of animals appears similarly to be the following-up by man of his connections with animal life, when this life began to be less abundant. It is probable that the practice originated in the habit of taking the young of animals home as pets, and there is apparently a point of difference between the attention of the men and the women given to animals once taken into the household. The men were interested in these animals as reviving in memory the emotional situations of hunting life, and also in the clever and inimitable accuracy of co-ordination and superhuman development of sense-perceptions, while there was always in the attitude of woman toward these animals a touch of maternal feeling, such as is still expended on the "harmless, necessary cat." And, in a small way, woman also contributed to the domestication of animals by giving them suck, partly as an economic investment. In Tahiti and New Britain, for example, the women suckle the pigs, and the old women feed them.[175] Aside from this, the connections which primitive woman has with animal life is very slight. Worms and insects, shellfish, and even fish she may capture, but but after this her relation to animal life is in caring for the flesh and skins turned over to her by the man.

It was a very general early practice that, when man had killed his game and brought it home, he was not concerned in the further handling of it. He did not, indeed, in all cases bring it home, but sent his wife after it. The Indians killed buffalo only as fast as the squaws could cut them up and care for the meat, and the men of the Eskimos would not draw the seal from the water after spearing it. Exhausted by extraordinary efforts, the man may well have left the dressing of the animal upon occasion to his wife, and, exhausted or not, he soon fell into the habit of doing so. It thus turns out that all labors relating to the preparation of food, and to the utilizations of the side-products of food stuffs, are apt to be found in the hands of the women.

Vessels are necessary in cooking, both to carry and hold water, and to store the surplus of food, both vegetable and animal, and the woman, feeling the need of these in connection with what she has set about doing, weaves baskets and makes pottery. Fetching wood, grinding corn, tanning the hides, and in the main the preparation of clothing, follow rather necessarily from her relation to the raw products. Spinning and weaving and dyeing are related closely to the vegetable world to begin with, and it is to be expected that they would be developed by the women. But man is very deeply interested in clothing on the ornamental side, and the farther back we go in society, the more this holds, and sometimes, particularly in Africa, since the domestication of oxen there, the men prepare the leather and do the sewing, even for the women. There is, indeed, nothing in the nature of sewing to make it a woman's occupation. It involves a relation of the hand to the eye—similar to that which the man is always practicing and using, i.e., reaching a given point, perhaps with mechanical aids, through the mediation of these two organs. It is a motor matter, therefore, and one of the first industries undertaken by men. There are many exceptions to the general statement that early manufacture (weapons excepted) was in the hands of women, but the exceptions may be regarded as variations due to the fixation of habit through single and peculiar incidents, or they are the beginning of the later period when man begins to practice woman's activities.

The primitive division of labor among the sexes was not in any sense an arrangement dictated by the men, but a habit into which both men and women fell, to begin with, through their difference of organization—a socially useful habit whose rightness no one questioned and whose origin no one thought of looking into. There is, moreover, a tendency in habits to become more fixed than is inherently necessary. The man who does any woman's work is held in contempt not only by men, but by women.

As to the Indian women, they are far from complaining of their lot. On the contrary, they would despise their husbands could they stoop to any menial office, and would think it conveyed an imputation upon their own conduct. It is the worst insult one virago can cast upon another in a moment of altercation. "Infamous woman," will she cry, "I have seen your husband carrying wood into the lodge to make the fire. Where was his squaw, that he should be obliged to make a woman of himself!"[176]

That men are similarly prejudiced against women's taking up male occupations we know from modern industrial history, without looking to ethnological evidence. Habit was, however, in another regard favorable to woman, since what she was constantly associated with and expended her activities upon was looked upon as hers. Through her identification with the industrial process she became, in fact, a property-owner. This result did not spring from the maternal system; but both this and the maternal system were the results of her bodily habit, and the social habits flowing from this.

When the woman as cultivator was almost the sole creator of property in land, she held in respect of this also a position of advantage. In the transactions of North American tribes with the colonial governments many deeds of assignments bear female signatures, which doubtless must also be referred to inheritance through the mother.[177]

Among the Spokanes "all household goods are considered as the wife's property."[178] The stores of roots and berries laid up by the Salish women for a time of scarcity "are looked upon as belonging to them personally, and their husbands will not touch them without having previously obtained their permission."[179] Among the Menomini a woman in good circumstances would possess as many as from 1,200 to 1,500 birch-bark vessels, and all of these would be in use during the season of sugar-making.[180] In the New Mexican pueblo,

what comes from outside the house, as soon as it is inside is put under the immediate control of the woman. My host at Cochiti, New Mexico, could not sell an ear of corn or a string of chile without the consent of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Ignacia, who kept house for her widowed father. In Cholula district (and probably all over Mexico) the man has acquired more power, and the storehouse is no longer controlled by the wife. But the kitchen remains her domain; and its aboriginal designation, tezcalli (place, or house, of her who grinds), is still perfectly justified.[181]

A plurality of wives is required by a good hunter, since in the labors of the chase women are of great service to their husbands. An Indian with one wife cannot amass property, as she is constantly occupied in household labors, and has not time for preparing skins for trading.[182]

The outcome of this closer attention of the woman to the industrial life is well seen among the ancient Hebrews:

A virtuous woman ... seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchant ships: she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and their task to her maidens. She considereth a field and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.... She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable: her lamp goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She spreadeth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household; for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh for herself carpets of tapestry; her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the gates, when linen garments and selleth them; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.[183]

There must come a time in the history of every group when wild game becomes scarce. This time is put off by successive migrations to wilder regions; but the rapid increase of population makes any continent inadequate to the supply of food through the chase indefinitely. Morgan estimates that the state of New York, with its 47,000 square miles, never contained at any one time more than 25,000 Indians.[184] Sooner or later the man must either fall back on the process represented by the women, taking up and developing her industries, or he must change his attitude toward animal life. In fact, he generally does both. He enters into a sort of alliance with animal life, or with certain of its forms, feeding them, and tending them, and breeding them; and he applies his katabolic energies to the pursuits of woman, organizing and advancing them. Whether the animal or the plant life receives in the end more attention is a matter turning on environment and other circumstances.

When the destructive male propensities have exhausted or diminished the food stores on the animal side, and man is forced to fall back on the constructive female process, we find that he brings greater and better organizing force to bear on the industries. Male enterprises have demanded concerted action. In order to surround a buffalo herd, or to make a successful assault, or even to row a large boat, organization and leadership are necessary. To attack under leaders, give signal cries, station sentinels, punish offenders, is, indeed, a part of the discipline even of animal groups. The organizing capacity developed by the male in human society in connection with violent ways of life is transferred to labor. The preparation of land for agriculture was undertaken by the men on a large scale. The jungle was cleared, water courses were diverted and highways prepared for the transportation of the products of labor.

But more than this, perhaps, man brought with him to the industrial occupations all the skill in fashioning force-appliances acquired through his intense, constant, and long-continued attention to the devising and manufacture of weapons. Man is relatively a feeble animal, but he made various and ingenious cutting, jabbing, and bruising appliances to compensate. His life was a life of strains, both giving and taking, and under the stress he had developed offensive and defensive weapons. There is, however, no radical difference, simply a difference in object and intensity of stimulus, between handling and making weapons and handling and making tools. So, when man was obliged to turn his attention to the agriculture and industries practiced by primitive woman he brought all his technological skill and a part of his technological interest to bear on the new problems. Women had been able to thrust a stick into the earth and drop the seed and await a meager harvest. When man turned his attention to this matter, his ingenuity eventually worked out a remarkable combination of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms: with the iron plow, drawn by the ox, he upturned the face of the earth, and produced food stuffs in excess of immediate demands, thus creating the conditions of culture.

The destructive habits of the male nature were thus converted under the stress of diminishing nutrition to the habits represented primarily by the constructive female nature, and the inventive faculty developed through attention to destructive mechanical aids was now applied equally to the invention of constructive mechanical aids.



SEX AND PRIMITIVE MORALITY

The function of morality is to regulate the activities of associated life so that all may have what we call fair play. It is impossible to think of morality aside from expressions of force, primarily physical force. "Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not remove the ancient landmark;" and all approvals and disapprovals imply that the act in question has affected or will affect the interest of others, or of society at large, for better or for worse. And since morality goes back so directly to forms of activity and their regulation, we may expect to find that the motor male and the more stationary female have had a different relation to the development of a moral code.

As between nutrition and reproduction, in the struggle for life, nutrition plays a larger role—in volume, at any rate—in the life-history of the individual. A consideration of the causes of the modification of species in nature shows that the changes in morphology and habit of the animal which relate to food-getting are more fundamental and numerous than those which relate to wooing. In a moral code, likewise, whether in an animal or human society, the bulk of morality turns upon food rather than sex relations; and since the male is more active in both these relations, and since, further, morality is the mode of regulating activities in these relations, it is to be expected that morality, and immorality as well, will be found primarily to a greater degree functions of the motor male disposition.

Tribal safety and the preservation and extension of the territory furnishing food demand the organized attention of the group first of all; and the emotional demonstrations and social rewards following modes of behavior which have a protective or provident meaning for the group, and the public disapproval and disallowance of modes of behavior which impair the safety or force capacity, and consequent satisfactions of the group, become in the tribe the most powerful of all stimuli, and stimuli to which the male is peculiarly able to react. This is not like the case of hunger and other physiological stimuli which are conditioned from within. The individual acts for the advantage of the group rather than for his personal advantage, and the stimulus to this action must be furnished socially. Group preservation being of first-rate importance, no group would survive in which the public showed apathy on this point. Lewis and Clarke say of the Dakota Indians:

What struck us most was an institution peculiar to them and to the Kite Indians, further to the westward, from whom it is said to have been copied. It is an association of the most active and brave young men, who are bound to each other by attachment, secured by a vow never to retreat before any danger, or to give way to their enemies. In war they go forward without sheltering themselves behind trees, or aiding their natural valor by any artifice.... These young men sit, and encamp, and dance together, distinct from the rest of the nation; they are generally about thirty or thirty-five years old; and such is the deference paid to courage that their seats in the council are superior to those of the chiefs, and their persons more respected.[185]

The consciousness of the value of male activity is here expressed in an exaggerated degree—in a degree bordering upon the pathological, since the reckless exposure of life to danger is not necessary to success at a given moment, and is unjustifiable from the standpoint of public safety, unless it be on the side of the suggestive effect of intrepid conduct in creating a general standard of intrepidity. Similarly, the Indians in general often failed to get the full benefit of a victory, because of their practice that the scalp of an enemy belonged to him who took it, and their pursuits after a rout were checked by the delay of each to scalp his own.

The pedagogical attempts of primitive society, so far as they are applied to boys, have as an end the encouragement of morality of a motor, not a sentimental, type. The boys are taught war and the chase, and to despise the occupations of women. Thompson says of the Zulu boys:

It is a melancholy fact that when they have arrived at a very early age, should their mothers attempt to chastise them, such is the law that these lads are at the moment allowed to kill their mothers.[186]

Ethnologists often make mention of the fact that the natural races do not generally punish children; and while this is due in part to a less definite sense of responsibility, as well as of less nervousness in parents, non-interference is a part of their system of training:

Instead of teaching the boy civil manners, the father desires him to beat and pelt the strangers who come to the tent; to steal or secrete in joke some trifling article belonging to them; and the more saucy and impudent they are, the more troublesome to strangers and all the men of the encampment, the more they are praised as giving indication of a future enterprising and warlike disposition.[187]

Theft is also encouraged among boys as a developer of their wits. The Spartan boy and the fox is a classical example; and Diodorus relates that in Egypt the boy who wished to become a thief was required to enrol his name with the captain of the thieves, and to turn over to him all stolen articles. The citizens who were robbed went to the captain of thieves and recovered their property upon payment of one-fourth of its value.[188] Admiration of a lawless deed often foreruns censure of the deed in consciousness today: there are few men who do not admire a particularly daring and successful bank or diamond robbery, though they deprecate the social injury done.

Formally becoming a man is made so much of in early society, because it is on this occasion that fitness for activity is put to the test. Initiatory ceremonies fall at the time of puberty in the candidate, and consist of instruction and trials of fortitude. A certain show of the proceeds of activity is also exacted of young men, especially in connection with marriage, and the youth is not permitted to marry until he has killed certain animals or acquired certain trophies. The attention given to manly practices in connection with marriage is seen in this example from the Kukis:

When a young man has fixed his affections upon a young woman, either of his own or some neighboring Parah, his father visits her father and demands her in marriage for his son: her father, on this, inquires what are the merits of the young man to entitle him to her favor; and how many can he afford to entertain at the wedding feast; to which the father of the young man replies that his son is a brave warrior, a good hunter, and an expert thief; for that he can produce so many heads of the enemies he has slain and of the game he has killed; that in his house are such and such stolen goods; and that he can feast so many (mentioning the number) at his marriage.[189]

Occasionally the ability to take punishment is even made a part of the marriage ceremony. At Arab marriages

there is much feasting, and the unfortunate bridegroom undergoes the ordeal of whipping by the relations of his bride, in order to test his courage. Sometimes this punishment is exceedingly severe, being inflicted with the coorbatch, or whip of hippopotamus hide, which is cracked vigorously about his ribs and back. If the happy husband wishes to be considered a man worth having, he must receive the chastisement with an expression of enjoyment; in which case the crowds of women in admiration again raise their thrilling cry.[190]

A very simple record of successful activity is the bones of animals. McCosh says of the Mishmis of India:

Nor are these hospitable rites allowed to be forgotten; the skull of every animal that has graced the board is hung up as a record in the hall of the entertainer; he who has the best-stocked Golgotha is looked upon as the man of the greatest wealth and liberality, and when he dies the whole smoke-dried collection of many years is piled upon his grave as a monument of his riches and a memorial of his worth.[191]

And Grange of the Nagas:

In front of the houses of the greater folks are strung up the bones of the animals with which they have feasted the villagers, whether tigers, elephants, cows, hogs, or monkeys, or aught else, for it signifies little what comes to their net.[192]

The head-hunting mania of Borneo is also a pathological expression of the desire to get approval of destructive activity from both the living and the dead:

The aged of the people were no longer safe among their kindred, and corpses were secretly disinterred to increase the grizzly store. Superstition soon added its ready impulse to the general movement. The aged warrior could not rest in his grave till his relatives had taken a head in his name; the maiden disdained the weak-hearted suitor whose hand was not yet stained with some cowardly murder.[193]

Class distinctions and the attendant ceremonial observances go immediately back to an appreciation of successful motor activities. We need only observe the conduct of weaker animals in the presence of the stronger to appreciate the differences in behavior induced by the presence of superior motor ability. The recognition of this difference, as it is finally expressed in habitual forms of behavior, becomes a symbol of the difference, while the difference goes back, in reality, to a difference in capacity. This example from Raffles illustrates the intensity of moral meaning which the appreciation of achievement may take on in the end:

At the court of Sura-kerta I recollect that once, when holding a private conference with the Susunan at the residency, it became necessary for the Radan adipati to be dispatched to the palace for the royal seal: the poor old man was, as usual, squatting, and as the Susunan happened to be seated with his face toward the door, it was fully ten minutes before his minister, after repeated ineffectual attempts, could obtain the opportunity of rising sufficiently to reach the latch without being seen by his royal master. The mission on which he was dispatched was urgent, and the Susunan himself inconvenienced by the delay; but these inconveniences were insignificant compared with the indecorum of being seen out of the dodok posture. When it is necessary for an inferior to move, he must still retain that position, and walk with his hams upon his heels until he is out of his superior's sight.[194]

Drury says that a Malagasy chief, on his return from war,

had scarcely seated himself at his door, when his wife came out crawling on her hands and knees until she came to him, and then licked his feet; when she had done, his mother did the same, and all the women in the town saluted their husbands in the same manner.[195]

An examination of the causes of the approval of conduct in early times thus discloses that approvals were based to a large degree on violent and socially advantageous conduct, that the training and rewards of early society were calculated to develop the skill and fortitude essential to such conduct, and that the men were particularly the representatives of conduct of this type. In the past, at any rate, there has been no glory like military glory, and no adulation like military adulation; and in the vulgar estimation still no quality in the individual ranks with the fighting quality.[196]

But checks upon conduct are even more definitely expressed, and more definitely expressible, than approvals of conduct. Approval is expressed in a more general expansive feeling toward the deserving individual, and this may be accompanied with medals for bravery, promotions, and other rewards; but in general the moral side of life gets no such definite notice as the immoral side. Practices which are disliked by all may be forbidden, while there is no equally summary way of dealing with practices approved by all. In consequence, practices which interfere with the activities of others are inhibited, and to the violation of the inhibition is attached a penalty, resulting in a body of law and a system of punishment. An analysis of the following crimes and punishments among the Kafirs, for instance, indicates that a definite relation between offensive forms of activity and punishments is present at a comparatively early period of development:

Theft: restitution and fine. Injuring cattle: death or fine, according to the circumstances. Causing cattle to abort: heavy fine. Arson: fine. False witness: heavy fine. Maiming: fine. Adultery: fine, sometimes death. Rape: fine, sometimes death. Using love philters: death or fine, according to circumstances. Poisoning, and practices with an evil intent (termed "witchcraft"): death and confiscation. Murder: death or fine, according to circumstances.... Treason, as contriving the death of a chief, conveying information to the enemy: death and confiscation. Desertion from the tribe: death and confiscation.[197]

Similarly among the Kukis:

Injuring the property of others, or taking it without payment; using violence; abusing parents; fraudulently injuring another; giving false evidence; speaking disrespectfully to the aged; marrying an elder brother's wife; putting your foot on, or walking over, a man's body; speaking profanely of religion—are acts of impiety.[198]

As the vigorous and aggressive activities of the male have a very conspicuous value for the group when exercised for the benefit of the group, they become particularly harmful when directed against the safety or interests of the group or the members of the group, and we find that civil and criminal law, and contract, and also conventional morality, are closely connected with the motility of the male. The establishment of moral standards is mediated through the sense of strain—strain to the personal self, and strain to the social self. Whether a man is injured by an assault upon his life or upon his property, he suffers violence, and the first resort of the injured individual or group is to similar violence; but this results in a vicious tit-for-tat reaction whereby the stimulus to violence is reinstated by every fresh act of violence. Within the group this vicious action and reaction is broken up by the intervention of public opinion, either in an informal expression of disapproval, or through the headmen. The man who continues to kill may be killed in turn, but by order of the council of the tribe; and one of his kinsmen may be appointed to execute him, as under that condition no feud can follow. But there is always a reluctance to banish or take the life of the member of the group, both because no definite machinery is developed for accomplishing either, and because the loss of an able-bodied member of a group is a loss to the group itself. The group does not seek, therefore, immediately to be rid of an offensive member, but to modify his habits, to convert him. Jones says of the Ojibways that there were occasionally bad ones among them, "but the good council of the wise sachems and the mark of disgrace put upon unruly persons had a very desirable influence."[199] The extreme form of punishment in the power of the folk-moot of the Tuschinen is to be excluded from the public feasts, and to be made a spectator while stoned in effigy and cursed.[200] Sending a man to Coventry is in vogue among the Fejir Beduins: one who kills a friend is so despised that he is never spoken to again, nor allowed to sit in the tent of any member of the tribe.[201]

The formulation of sentiment about an act depends also on the repetition of the act. The act is more irritating, and the irritation more widespread, with each repetition, and there is an increase of the penalty for a second offense, and death for a slight offense when frequently repeated: in the Netherlands stealing of linen left in the fields to be bleached led to the death penalty for stealing a pocket handkerchief. And with increasing definiteness of authority there follows increasing definiteness of punishment; and when finally the habit becomes fixed, conformity with it becomes a paramount consideration, and a deed is no longer viewed with reference to its intrinsic import so much as to its conformity or nonconformity with a standard in the law: summum jus, summa injuria.

Morality, involving the modification of the conduct of the individual in view of the presence of others, is already highly developed in the tribal stage, since the exigencies of life have demanded the most rigorous regulation of behavior in order to secure the organization and the prowess essential to success against all comers. But the tribe is a unit in hostile coexistence with other similar units, and its morality stops within itself, and applies in no sense to strangers and outsiders. The North American Indians were theoretically at war with all with whom they had not concluded a treaty of peace. In Africa the traveler is safe and at an advantage if by a fiction (the rite of blood-brotherhood) he is made a member of the group; and similarly in Arabia and elsewhere. The old epics and histories are full of the praises of the man who is gentle within the group and furious without it. The earliest commandments doubtless did not originally apply to mankind at large. They meant, "Thou shalt not kill within the tribe," "Thou shalt not commit adultery within the tribe," etc. Cannibalism furnishes a most interesting example of the prohibition of a practice as applied to the members of the group, while extra-tribal cannibalism continued unabated. And within the tribe there is a continuance of this practice in the forms which do not interfere with the efficiency and cripple the activity of the group. That is, while cannibalism in general is prohibited, the eating of the decrepit, the aged, of invalids, of deformed children, and of malefactors is still practiced.[202]

But there gradually grew up a set of disapprovals of conduct as such, whether within or without the group. In the Odyssey Pallas Athene says that Odysseus had come from Ephyra from Ilus, son of Mermerus: "For even thither had Odysseus gone on his swift ship to seek a deadly drug, that he might have wherewithal to smear his bronze-shod arrows: but Ilus would in no wise give it to him, for he had in awe the everlasting gods."[203] Here is an extension to society in general of a principle which had been first worked out in the group; for poisoning without the group was long allowed after it was disallowed in the group. The case of poisoning is, indeed, a particularly good instance of an unsatisfaction felt in the substitution of clandestine methods for simple motor force in deciding a dispute, and affords a clear example of an important relation between moral feeling and physiological functioning. Animal as well as human society has developed strategy alongside of direct motor expressions, but strategy is only an indirect application of the motor principle. Co-ordination, associative memory, will, judgment, are involved in strategy; it is only a different mode of functioning. On the other hand, there is a peculiar abhorrence of murder by night, poisoning, drowning in a ship's hold, because, while all the physiological machinery for action is on hand, there is no chance to work it. It is a most exasperating thing to die without making a fight for it. The so-called American duel is an abhorrent thing, because life or death is decided by a turn of the dice, not on the racially developed principle of the battle to the strong.

When, then, it is observed within the group that this, that, and the other man has died of poison, each interprets this in terms of himself, and no one feels safe. The use of poison is not only a means of checking activities and doing hurt socially, but this form is most foul and unnatural because it involves a death without the possibility of motor resistance (except the inadequate opportunity on the strategic side of taking precautionary measures against poison) and a victory and social reward without a struggle. The group, therefore, early adopts very severe methods in this regard. Death is the usual penalty for the use of poison, and even the possession of poison, among tribes not employing it for poisoning weapons, is punished. Among the Karens of India, if a man is found with poison in his possession, he is bound and placed for three days in the hot sun, his poison is destroyed, and he is pledged not to obtain any more. If he is suspected of killing anyone, he is executed.[204] Particularly distressing modes of death, and other means of penalizing death by poison more severely than motor modes of killing, were adopted. The Chinese punish the preparation of poisons or capture of poisonous animals with beheading, confiscation, and banishment of wife and children. In Athens insanity caused by poison was punished with death. The Sachsenspiegel provides death by fire. In the lawbook of the tsar Wachtang a double composition price was exacted for death by poison. And in ancient Wales death and confiscation were the penalty for death by poison, and death or banishment the penalty of the manufacturer of poisons. The same quality of disapproval is expressed in early law of sorcery, and it is unnecessary to give details of this also. But, stated in emotional terms, both poison and sorcery, and other underhand practices arouse one of the most distressing of the emotions—the emotion of dread, if we understand by this term that form of fear which has no tangible or visible embodiment, which is apprehended but not located, and which in consequence cannot be resisted; the distress, in fact, lying in the inability to function. The organism which has developed structure and function through action is unsatisfied by an un-motor mode of decision. We thus detect in the love of fair play, in the Golden Rule, and in all moral practices a motor element; and with changing conditions there is progressively a tendency, mediated by natural selection and conscious choice, to select those modes of reaction in which the element of chance is as far as possible eliminated. This preference for functional over chance or quasi-chance forms of decision is expressed first within the group, but is slowly extended, along with increasing commercial communication, treaties of peace, and with supernatural assistance, to neighboring groups. The case of Odysseus is an instance of a moment in the life of the race when a disapproval is becoming of general application.

On our assumption that morality is dependent on strains, and that its development is due to the advantage of regulating these strains, we may readily understand why most of the canons of morality are functions of the katabolic male activity. Theft, arson, rape, murder, burglary, highway robbery, treason, and the like, are natural accompaniments of the more aggressive male disposition; the male is par excellence both the hero and the criminal. But on the side of the sex we might expect to find the female disposition setting the standards of morality, since reproduction is even a greater part of her nature than of man's. On the contrary, however, we find the male standpoint carried over and applied to the reproductive process, and the regulation of sex practices transpiring on the basis of force. In the earliest period of society, under the maternal system, the woman had her own will more with her person; but with the formulation of a system of control, based on male activities, the person of woman was made a point in the application of the male standpoint. "The wife, like any other of the husband's goods and chattels, might be sold or lent."[205] "Even when divorced she was by no means free, as the tribe exercised its jurisdiction in the woman's affairs and the disposal of her person."[206] Forsyth reports of the Gonds that