It is very easy to exaggerate the bright as well as the dark features of primitive social life. The reports of travelers, often untrained in the interpretation of the facts which they observe, are notoriously untrustworthy. It is extremely difficult to discern the motives which actuate men in a stage of culture remote from our own. Nevertheless it seems certain that the position of uncivilized woman with respect to marriage is not quite so hopeless as is generally imagined. The facts appear to demonstrate that woman's original liberty of selection has never been entirely lost. It is evident that wife-purchase, though sometimes the means of degradation, even of marital bondage, is compatible with a high degree of matrimonial choice. The ideas which influence the "uncivilized" man in selling his daughter are probably often very similar to those which govern the thrifty father in modern society when he insists on securing a good "match" for his child. The price is regarded as a fair equivalent for the services to which the parent is justly entitled in return for rearing the girl.[704] The Kafir maiden who brings a good price from her suitor is not therefore necessarily a "chattel" any more than is the daughter whose labor the civilized parent lets out for hire.[705] A high price may be looked upon also as a proper recognition of the rank or of the mental and physical attractions of the bride.[706] Furthermore, it is significant that actual bride-purchase may coexist with advanced ethical and religious conceptions of the marriage state. Such, according to Kohler, is the case in the Punjab, where the courts under British rule have decided that the sale of a woman to be a wife is not punishable as a crime under the statute forbidding the sale of a human being into slavery;[707] and Leist has shown that in the _dharma_ period of early Aryan history the purchased wife was not regarded as a "thing," but in the fullest sense as a free wife entitled to share the _sacra_ of the husband's house. Nay, the actual payment of the legal bride-money in certain cases was the only means through which marriage by purchase could reach the proper ethical end of legitimate marriage: the birth of a son to perpetuate the ancestral worship.[708] [704] So among the Kafirs: SHOOTER, _The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country_ (London, 1857), 49: WESTERMARCK, _op. cit._, 402; and among other tribes: _ibid._, 402, note. [705] Compare the remark of WAKE, _op. cit._, 199, who, in speaking of purchase in its relations to polygyny, says: "It may be doubted whether the ideas which govern such a transaction (wife-purchase) are very different from those which guide persons under similar circumstances in monogamatic societies. When the savage buys a girl to be his wife, it is for the purpose of having, if not a companion, a helpmate, and a mother of his children, and her father parts with her for those objects."