contracting parties celebrates its victory, while the child is an unwished-for, in the most favorable case, an indifferent accident, a resulting consequence not easily to be avoided, but always of secondary importance.
The objection may be made that among peoples living still in natural, primitive conditions of life, the majority of marriages are contracted after the same fashion as in the midst of our civilization. Among them also, affection plays no role in the establishment of a new household. In some tribes the man marries a maiden whom he sees for the first time after the wedding ceremonies are over. In others the would-be bridegroom carries off the first woman of some neighboring tribe that he meets and is able to capture. When the bride is chosen, the choice has nothing to do with love. She is selected to be the mistress of a home, because it is known in the tribe that she can work faithfully, take good care of the domestic animals, spin and weave well. In this case also the perpetuation of the tribe is left to blind chance or to egotism, and yet such peoples are full of youthful vitality and their development far from suffering from this condition of things, is progressing rapidly and satisfactorily. We can reply to this objection that marriages founded not on love but on selfishness and social station do not have the same bad results among uncivilized peoples as among the civilized, owing to anthropological causes. There is but little mental or physical difference between the individuals comprising a primitive people. The tribal type is shown in every man and in every woman alike, and an individual type does not exist at all or at most only as a germ. All the individuals seem to have been cast in the same mould and resemble each other to a perplexing degree; for breeding purposes they all have about the same value. Natural selection is not a necessarily preceding condition of
