Senancour, _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 233. The author of _The
Question of English Divorce_ attributes the absence of any widespread
feeling against sexual license to the absurd rigidity of the law.

[269] Bruno Meyer, "Etwas von Positiver Sexualreform," _Sexual-Probleme_,
Nov., 1908.

[270] Elsie Clews Parsons, _The Family_, p. 351. Dr. Parsons rightly
thinks such unions a social evil when they check the development of
personality.

[271] For evidence regarding the general absence of celibacy among both
savage and barbarous peoples, see, e.g., Westermarck, _History of Human
Marriage_, Ch. VII.

[272] There are, for instance, two millions of unmarried women in France,
while in Belgium 30 per cent, of the women, and in Germany sometimes even
50 per cent, are unmarried.

[273] Such a position would not be biologically unreasonable, in view of
the greatly preponderant part played by the female in the sexual process
which insures the conservation of the race. "If the sexual instinct is
regarded solely from the physical side," says D.W.H. Busch (_Das
Geschlechtsleben des Weibes_, 1839, vol. i, p. 201), "the woman cannot be
regarded as the property of the man, but with equal and greater reason the
man may be regarded as the property of the woman."

[274] Herodotus, Bk. i, Ch. CLXXIII.

[275] That power and relationship are entirely distinct was pointed out
many years ago by L. von Dargun, _Mutterrecht und Vaterrecht_, 1892.
Westermarck (_Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. i, p. 655),
who is inclined to think that Steinmetz has not proved conclusively that
mother-descent involves less authority of husband over wife, makes the
important qualification that the husband's authority is impaired when he
lives among his wife's kinsfolk.

[276] Robertson Smith, _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_; J.G. Frazer
has pointed out (_Academy_, March 27, 1886) that the partially Semitic
peoples on the North frontier of Abyssinia, not subjected to the
revolutionary processes of Islam, preserve a system closely resembling
_beena_ marriage, as well as some traces of the opposite system, by
Robertson Smith called _ba'al_ marriage, in which the wife is acquired by
purchase and becomes a piece of property.

[277] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 358.

[278] Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, _The Welsh People_, pp. 55-6; cf. Rhys,
_Celtic Heathendom_, p. 93.

[279] Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, op. cit., p.