composed sensibly of equal numbers of men and women, the more powerful and rich may monopolise several women by the right of the strongest, but in doing so they wrong the community, and public opinion becomes hostile to the practice. It is thus that with the Dyaks the chiefs lose their authority and see their influence diminish when they indulge in polygamy, although no law forbids it.[1]
Another cause quite as powerful which contributed greatly to lead to legal monogamy was the institution of individual and hereditary property. L. Morgan does not hesitate to refer monogamic marriage to this sole origin. Indeed, in all societies more or less civilised, the desire for heritable property has quickly assumed a capital importance; the more or less equitable regulation of questions of interest, and the anxiety to safeguard these interests, form the solid basis of all written codes. Now, nearly everywhere the heritage is transmitted according to filiation, sometimes maternal, sometimes paternal; but it is only in the monogamic régime that the parentage of children is the same for all in the paternal as well as the maternal line.[2]
Over and above this, moral motives have reinforced the great influences resulting from the laws of natality and the all-powerful questions of interest. In theory or ideal, the life-long union of two beings, giving and devoting themselves to each other, engaging to share good and evil fortune, is surely very noble; but, as we shall see, the realisation of monogamic marriage has everywhere been most gross, and it is difficult to refer it to elevated aspirations. Unless we are intoxicated with sentimentalism, we cannot believe, with Bachofen,[3] that women, naturally more noble and more sensitive than their gross companions, grew tired of primitive hetaïrism, and, obeying powerful religious aspirations, enthroned monogamic marriage by force, becoming by the same stroke heads of the family, and inaugurating gynecocracy. These Amazonian fables are very energetically contradicted by history and ethnography.
