All this may indeed be “marvellously pretty and romantic,” but I fail to see the least indication of the “higher emotions.”  Nor can I find them in some further interesting remarks regarding the Hos made by the same author (192-93).  Thirty years ago, he says, a girl of the better class cost forty or fifty head of cattle.  Result—­a decrease in the number of marriages and an increase of immoral intimacies.  Sometimes a girl runs away with her lover, but the objection to this is that elopements are not considered respectable.

“It is certainly not from any yearning for celibacy that the marriage of Singbhum maidens is so long postponed.  The girls will tell you frankly that they do all they can to please the young men, and I have often heard them pathetically bewailing their want of success.  They make themselves as attractive as they can, flirt in the most demonstrative manner, and are not too coy to receive in public attentions from those they admire.  They may be often seen in well-assorted pairs returning from market with arms interlaced, and looking at each other as lovingly as if they were so many groups of Cupids and Psyches, but with all this the ‘men will not propose.’  Tell a maiden you think her nice-looking, she is sure to reply ’Oh, yes!  I am, but what is the use of it, the young men of my acquaintance don’t see it.’”

Here we note a frankly commercial view of marriage, without any reference to “higher emotions.”  In this tribe, too, the girls are not allowed the liberty of choice.  Indeed, when we examine this point we find that Westermarck is wrong, as usual, in assigning such a privilege to the girls of most of these tribes.  He himself is obliged to admit (224) that

“in many of the uncivilized tribes of India parents are in the habit of betrothing their sons....  The paternal authority approaches the patria potestas of the ancient Aryan nations.”

The Kisans, Mundas, Santals, Marias, Mishmis, Bhils, and Yoonthalin Karens are tribes among whom fathers thus reserve the right of selecting wives for their sons; and it is obvious that in all such cases daughters have still less choice than sons.  Colonel Macpherson throws light on this point when he says of the Kandhs: 

“The parents obtain the wives of their sons during their boyhood, as very valuable domestic servants, and their selections are avowedly made with a view to utility in this character."[258]

Rowney reports (103) that the Khond boys are married at the age of ten and twelve to girls of fifteen to sixteen; and among the Reddies it is even customary to marry boys of five or six years to women of sixteen to twenty.  The “wife,” however, lives with an uncle or relation, who begets children for the boy-husband.  When the boy grows up his “wife” is perhaps too old for him, so he in turn takes possession of some other boy’s “wife".[259] The young