This fragility of marriages is common in savage countries. The man always has the right of repudiation, and very often the reciprocal right exists also. This fact seems even less rare among savages than it is later, at the middle period of the development of civilisation, when the patriarchal family is solidly established. In North America, meaning, of course, savage America, the classic land of the matriarchate, man nevertheless enjoys nearly always the right of repudiation, often without limits; but certain tribes either admit divorce by mutual consent, or limit the right of repudiation, or recognise certain rights of the wife. The Malemoute Esquimaux drive away their wives at will,[730] as do also the Kamtschatdales, their congeners of Asia;[731] but, with the Esquimaux, hardly any but a free and capricious union is known; there is as yet no durable marriage. It is nearly the same in a certain number of American tribes, where divorce is easy at the will of the two parties. Among the Dakota Santals the wife who is ill treated by her companion has the right to retire; but she cannot take the children without the husband’s consent.[732] The marriage of the Iroquois, and of some other neighbouring tribes, was also broken by mutual consent. These Redskins lived in great common houses, each one inhabited by a fraction of the tribe, a _gens_, and consequently, that one of the divorced couple whose relations dominated in the _gens_, remained there; the other was forced to depart.[733] The Redskins of California also practised this easy and mutual divorce.[734] The Navajos still recognised the right of the wife to leave her husband, but already the masculine point of honour entered into play, and the deserted husband was obliged, under pain of ridicule, to revenge himself by killing some one.[735] At Guatemala the wife and husband could part at will and on the slightest pretext.[736] The Moxos of South America only regarded marriage as an agreement that could be dissolved by the will of the two parties.[737] But in many other Redskin tribes the right of divorce seems far from being reciprocal; it is replaced, to the detriment of the wife, by repudiation, which the husband can pronounce with a word. According to the Abbé Domenech, it is the fear of this terrible word which maintains an appearance of harmony among the many women in the interior of the Indian wigwams.[738] With the Chippeways a man takes or buys a girl of twelve, and sends her back when he is tired of her.[739] The Chinook husband can also repudiate his wife according to his caprice.[740] In a tribe of the Nahuas, the husbands enjoyed the same rights, but on condition of exercising them on the day after the marriage; the experimental union preceded the durable one.[741] In New Mexico, the husband repudiated at will, on condition only of restoring his wife’s possessions.[742] A single word of the Caribean husbands also sufficed