time is not generally recognised. If "property" has any sound basis, it can only be found in the security of possession by an individual of that which he himself has made; at the present time a man's "property" usually consists in that which he may have acquired by inheritance, or by more or less legal annexation of other people's belongings. Certain kinds of falsehood and of theft are crimes, such as perjury and burglary; other kinds are sins, such as gambling on the turf or the Stock Exchange, and various conventions of trade. It is idle to express horror at the annexations of the ordinary thief, and to express admiration at the annexations of the extraordinary gambler. In the court of morality the common thief and the speculator in Egyptian loans stand on the same level; both inherit the old thieving instinct; the fox and the gipsy still survive to rob the henroost, and people ask why theft is so common, when our progenitors were predaceous brutes and predaceous savages. Once again, Science bids us look backward at our ancestry when we seek the origin of evil.
The origin of self-regarding sins is as readily discovered. We may take as a type the sin of unchastity. The law, in the most civilised states, has marked some sexual actions as crimes; the word unchastity is applicable to all kinds of sexual actions which are injurious to the individual or to society, but ought not to be applied to acts which are really harmless to both, even though they be condemned by a tradition inherited from semi-barbarous times. In dealing with this question we come to a class of actions which we have above described as a sub-class of type (a).
Chastity is not, in the savage state, regarded as a virtue at all. The natural mutual inclination of the sexes is taken for granted, and the savage is no more ashamed of it than is the brute. Many tribes—as the Andaman, South African, Australian—wear no clothes, and practise promiscuity in the most perfectly public fashion. Darwin tells us that "it is even doubtful whether in some tribes incest would be looked on with greater horror than would the marriage of a man with a woman bearing the same name, though not a relation" ("Descent of Man," p. 115, ed. 1875). Büchner quotes N. von Nicklucko-Maclay as stating that the Papuans "have no idea of incest, and the fathers exercise the jus primæ noctis on their marriageable daughters" ("Force and Matter", p. 367). The consecration of female
