In a remarkable book, which has not yet had all the success it deserves, Lewis Morgan believes he has recognised five stages in the evolution of the family: 1st, the family is consanguineous—that is to say, founded on the marriage of brothers and sisters of a group; 2nd, several brothers are the common husbands of their wives, who are not sisters; 3rd, a man and woman unite, but without exclusive cohabitation, and with faculty of divorce for one or the other; 4th, then comes the pastoral family of the Hebrews, the marriage of one man with several women; but this patriarchal form has not been universal; 5th, at last appeared the family of civilised societies, the most modern, characterised by the exclusive cohabitation of one man and one woman. Not taking this classification too literally, and reserving a place for varieties and exceptions, we have here five stages which mark tolerably well the evolution of the family in humanity.
The moral direction of this slow transformation is evident; it proceeds from a communism more or less extensive to individualism; from the clan, where all is solidarity, to the family and the individual, having their own interests, which are as distinct as possible from those of other families and other individuals. Each one has endeavoured to get for himself as large a share as possible of that which was formerly held in common; each man has aimed at obtaining a more and more exclusive right over property, wife, and children. From these appetites, more economic than ethereal, have at length proceeded the patriarchal family, monogamy, and familial property, and later, individual property;[1] the régime of the family and that of property have evolved in company. But this transformation has been effected by extremely slow degrees; for a long time the new régime bore the mark of the old one in certain rights reserved to the clan, in certain prohibitions, in certain obligations, which still imposed some solidarity on individuals—as, for example, the legal injunction to help a man in peril, to hasten to the assistance of a village plundered by robbers, the general duty of hospitality, etc.—all of them precepts formulated by the codes of Egypt and India, and
- ↑ A. Giraud-Teulon, Orig. du Mariage, etc., p. 428.—L. Morgan, Ancient Societies, p. 389.
