e, and which is
stubbornly upheld as irrefutable by the representatives of the _status
quo_--to the effect that the existing family-form has existed since time
immemorial, and, lest the whole social fabric be put in jeopardy, must
continue to exist forever, turned out, accordingly, after these
discoveries of the investigators, to be wholly false and untenable. The
form, under which the relations of the sexes appear and the situation of
the family is raised, depends rather upon the social conditions, upon
the manner in which man controls his subsistence. The form changes with
the changed degree of culture at each given period.

The study of primitive history leaves now no room for doubt that, at the
lowest grades of human development, the relation of the sexes is totally
different from that of latter times, and that a state of things resulted
therefrom, which, looked at with modern eyes, appears as monstrous, and
as a sink of immorality. Nevertheless, as each social stage of human
development has its own conditions of production, so likewise has each
its own code of morals, which is but the _reflection of the social
condition_. That is moral which is usage; and that, in turn, is usage
which corresponds with the innermost being, i. e., the needs of a given
period.

Morgan reaches the conclusion that, at the lower period of savagery,
there was sexual intercourse between the several grades or generations,
every woman belonging to every man, and every man to every woman,--in
other words, promiscuity. All men live in polygamy and all women in
polyandry. There is a general community of women and of men, but also a
community of children, Strabo reports (sixty-six years before our
reckoning) that, among the Arabians, brothers cohabited with sisters and
with their own mother. On any route other than that of incest, the
increase of population is nowhere possible, if, as alleged in the Bible
also, descent from one couple is granted. The Bible itself contradicts
itself on this delicate point. It is stated there that Cain, after he
had murdered his brother Abel, took a wife of another people. Whence
came that other people? The theory of promiscuity in primitive times,
that is to say, that the horde was endogamous, that sexual intercourse
was indiscriminate, is furthermore supported by the Hindoo myth,
according to which Brahma married his own daughter Saravasti. The same
myth turns up again among the Egyptians and the northern Edda.