their wives
and children, eat at his table; none of his descendants can marry
without his consent, etc. The effects of patriarchism are deplorable
and very immoral. The patriarch abuses his power--gives his old wives
to his children and takes the young ones, for example. The purest and
most virtuous Japanese girl is obliged to go to a brothel if her
father orders it. The patriarch has the power of life and death over
both sexes, and from this is derived the cult of ancestors. At the
present day we see immorality of this kind in the Russian patriarchism
among the peasants; the fathers have the custom of misusing their
sons' wives. Patriarchism thus degenerates into atrocious tyranny on
the part of the chief of the family, who becomes looked upon as a
god.

A law which is common in the Latin races, which forbids marriage
before the age of thirty, without the consent of the father, is a
vestige of patriarchism.

We see, therefore, that quite primitive savage races approached our
most modern ideas in liberty of choice in marriage. Between these two
periods humanity was under the yoke of a barbarous error--the
intermediate stage of marriage by purchase and patriarchal autocracy.
There has existed and still exists more than one aberration of this
kind in the intermediate stages of civilization; for instance,
torture, slavery and the use of narcotic substances, such as alcohol.

SEXUAL SELECTION

By sexual selection we mean union by choice among males and females.
In the vertebrates, the female chooses much more commonly than the
male, the latter being more disposed to pair with all the females than
the females with all the males. We may certainly admit that this was
also the case in primitive man, especially when there existed a
rutting period, for then the sexual appetite was more violent.
Moreover, even at the present day, women are on the average more
difficult to please and more strict in their choice than men.

In the case of hybrids it is generally the male which violates the law
of instinct. Female slaves often flee from their free husbands, but we
never see male slaves abandon their free wives. Among savage races the
woman is always more difficult to please than the man. Among
half-breeds, it is nearly always the father who belongs to a higher
race. The inverse rarely occurs; it is exceptional for a white woman
to marry a negro. The same thing is reproduced among ourselves; we
often see a cultured man marry