practically unlimited extent to which public opinion has always
regulated marriage. If the traditions of one tribe were endogamous, all
the men dutifully married within it; but if the customs of another
decreed that wives must be secured by capture or purchase, all the men
of that tribe fared forth in order to secure their mates. From the
primitive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange for his sisters
or daughters, and never dreams of obtaining them in any other way, to
the sophisticated young Frenchman, who without objection marries the
bride his careful parents select for him; from the ancient Hebrew, who
contentedly married the widow of his deceased brother because it was
according to the law, to the modern Englishman who refused to marry his
deceased wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire pathway of
the so-called uncontrollable instinct has been gradually confined
between carefully clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house of
conventional domesticity. Men have fallen in love with their cousins or
declined to fall in love with them, very much as custom declared
marriages between cousins to be desirable or undesirable, as they
formerly married their sisters and later absolutely ceased to desire to
marry them. In fact, regulation of this great primitive instinct goes
back of the human race itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are
strictly monogamous, and many species of birds are faithful to one mate,
season after season. According to the great authority, Forel,
prostitution never became established among primitive peoples. Even
savage tribes designated the age at which their young men were permitted
to assume paternity because feeble children were a drag upon their
communal resources. As primitive control lessened with the disappearance
of tribal organization and later of the patriarchal family, a social
control, not less binding, was slowly established, until throughout the
centuries, in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass of men have
lived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements of