it is only out of respect to custom." Westermarck
(_History of Human Marriage_, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the
connection between the high estimates of virginity and the
conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in
his later work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(vol. ii, Ch. XLII), after pointing out that "marriage by
purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity," he
refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an
unmarried girl "is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an
offense against the parents or family of the girl," and there is
no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has
been done to the woman herself. Westermarck recognizes at the
same time that the preference given to virgins has also a
biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy
in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and
especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of
shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt
with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these _Studies_.)

It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the
virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A.B. Ellis seems
to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that
wife-purchase should always accompany it. The preference still
persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but
as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property,
among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form
of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase. Under such
conditions a woman's chastity has an important social function to
perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (_The Morality of
Marriage_, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man's property. The
fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question
is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial
chastity in the husband.

It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case,
there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial
intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails. That has
probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages.
The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits
(_Reports Cambridge Anthropo