“It is untrue that in sexual license the savage has ever anything to learn.  In almost every tribe there are pollutions deeper than any I have thought it necessary to mention, and all that the lower fringe of civilized men can do to harm the uncivilized is to stoop to the level of the latter, instead of teaching them a better way."[165]

THE QUESTION OF PROMISCUITY

As regards the promiscuity question, Spencer and Gillen’s observations go far to confirm some of the seemingly fantastic speculations regarding “a thousand miles of wives,” and so on, contained in the volume of Fison and Howitt[166] and to make it probable that unregulated intercourse was the state of primitive man at a stage of evolution earlier than any known to us now.  Since the appearance of Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage it has become the fashion to regard the theory of promiscuity as disproved.  Alfred Russell Wallace, in his preface to this book, expresses his opinion that “independent thinkers” will agree with its author on most of the points wherein he takes issue with his famous predecessors, including Spencer, Morgan, Lubbock, and others.  Ernst Grosse, in a volume which the president of the German Anthropological Society pronounced “epoch-making”—­Die Formen der Familie—­refers (43) to Westermarck’s “very thorough refutation” of this theory, which he stigmatizes as one of the blunders of the unfledged science of sociology which it will be best to forget as soon as possible; adding that “Westermarck’s best weapons were, however, forged by Starcke.”

In a question like this, however, two independent observers are worth more than two hundred “independent thinkers.”  Spencer and Gillen are eye-witnesses, and they inform us repeatedly (100, 105, 108, 111) that Westermarck’s objections to the theory of promiscuity do not stand the test of facts and that none of his hypotheses explains away the customs which point to a former prevalence of promiscuity.  They have absolutely disproved his assertion (539) that “it is certainly not among the lowest peoples that sexual relations most nearly approach promiscuity.”  Cunow, who, as Grosse admits (50), has written the most thorough and authentic monograph on the complicated family relationship of Australia, devotes two pages (122-23) to exposing some of Westermarck’s arguments, which, as he shows, “border on the comic.”  I myself have in this chapter, as well as in those on Africans, American Indians, South Sea Islanders, etc., revealed the comicality of the assertion that there is in a savage condition of life “comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations,” which forms one of the main props of Westermarck’s anti-promiscuity theory; and I have also reduced ad absurdum his systematic overrating of savages in the matter of liberty of choice, esthetic taste and capacity for affection which resulted from his pet theory and marred his whole book.[167]