While conceding that “the manners of the inferior races do not imply much coyness,” Spencer, nevertheless, thinks “we cannot suppose coyness to be wholly absent.”  He holds that in the cases just cited coyness is responsible for the resistance of the women, and he goes so far as to make this coyness “an important factor,” in accounting for the custom of marriage by capture which has prevailed among so many peoples in all parts of the world.  Westermarck declares (388) that this suggestion can scarcely be disproved, and Grosse (105) echoes his judgment.  To me, on the contrary, it seems that these distinguished sociologists are putting the cart before the horse.  They make the capture a sequence of “coyness,” whereas in truth the coyness (if it may be so called) is a result of capture.  The custom of wife capture can be easily explained without calling in the aid of what we have seen to be so questionable a thing as primitive female coyness.  Savages capture wives as the most coveted spoils of war.  They capture them, in other instances, because polygamy and female infanticide have disturbed the equilibrium of the sexes, thus compelling the young men to seek wives elsewhere than in their own tribes; and the same result is brought about (in Australia, for instance), by the old men’s habit of appropriating all the young women by a system of exchange, leaving none for the young men, who, therefore, either have to persuade the married women to elope—­at the risk of their lives—­or else are compelled to steal wives elsewhere.  In another very large number of cases the men stole brides—­willing or unwilling—­to avoid paying their parents for them.

THE COMEDY OF MOCK CAPTURE

Thus the custom of real capture is easily accounted for.  What calls for an explanation is the sham capture and resistance in cases where both the parents and the bride are perfectly willing.  Why should primitive maidens who, as we have seen, are rather apt than not to make amorous advances, repel their suitors so violently in these instances of mock capture?  Are they, after all, coy—­more coy than civilized maidens?  To answer this question let us look at one of Spencer’s witnesses more carefully.  The reason Crantz gives for the Eskimo women’s show of aversion to marriage is that they do it, “lest they lose their reputation for modesty.”  Now modesty of any kind is a quality unknown to Eskimos.  Nansen, Kane, Hayes, and other explorers have testified that the Eskimos of both sexes take off all their clothes in their warm subterranean homes.  Captain Beechey has described their obscene dances, and it is well-known that they consider it a duty to lend their wives and daughters to guests.  Some of the native tales collected by Rink (236-37; 405) indicate most unceremonious modes of courtship and nocturnal frolics, which do not stop even at incest.  To suppose that women so utterly devoid of moral sensibility