THEORIES OF PRIMITIVE MARRIAGE. 283 



were regarded as more honorably married than the rest, there would 

 result an ambition, if not to capture a wife, still to seem to capture a 

 wife. In every society the inferior ape the superior ; and customs thus 

 spread among classes, the ancestors of which did not observe them. 

 The antique-looking portraits that decorate many a modern, large 

 house, by no means demonstrate the distinguished ancestry of the 

 owner; but may merely simulate a distinguished ancestry. The coat 

 of arms a wealthy mah bears does not necessarily imply descent from 

 men who once had their shields and flags covered by such marks of 

 identity. The plumes borne on a hearse do not prove that the dead 

 occupant had forefathers who wore knightly decorations. And, simi- 

 larly, it does not follow that all the members of tribes who go through 

 the form of capturing their wives at marriage are descendants of men 

 who in earlier days actually captured their wives. Mr. McLennan 

 himself points out that, among sundry ancient peoples, captured wives 

 were permitted to the military class, though not to other classes. If 

 we suppose a society formed of a dominant military class, originally 

 the conquerors, who practised wife-capture, and a subject class who 

 could not practise it and if we ask what would happen when such a 

 society fell into more peaceful relations with adjacent like societies, 

 and obtained wives from them no longer by force, but by purchase or 

 other friendly arrangement we may see that, in the first place, the 

 form of capture would replace the actuality of capture in the mar- 

 riages of this dominant class ; for, as Mr. McLennan contends, con- 

 formity to ancestral usage would necessitate the simulation of capture 

 after actual capture has ceased. And when, in the dominant class, 

 wife-capture had thus passed into a form, it would be imitated by the 

 subject class as being the most honorable form. Such among the 

 inferior as had risen to superior social positions would first adopt it; 

 and they would gradually be followed by those below them. So that, 

 even were there none of the other probable origins named above, a 

 surviving form of capture in any society would not necessarily show 

 that society to have been exogamous, but would merely show that 

 wife-capture was in early times practised by its leading men. 



And now, pursuing the argument, let us see whether exogamy and 

 endogamy are not simultaneously accounted for as correlative results 

 of the same differentiating process. Setting out with a state in which 

 the relations of the sexes were indefinite, variable, and determined by 

 the passions and circumstances of the occasion, we have to explain 

 how exogamy and endogamy became established, the one here, the 

 other there, as consequences of surrounding conditions. The efficient 

 conditions were the relations to other tribes, now peaceful but mostly 

 hostile, some of them strong, and some of them weak. 



Necessarily, a primitive group not commonly at war with neigh- 

 boring groups must be endogamous ; for the taking of women from 



