It is quite possible to have been thus in a certain number of countries; but we must beware of seeing in this a necessary and general evolution. Surely savage hordes and tribes naturally carry off the women and girls of their neighbours and enemies, the little groups with whom they are incessantly struggling for existence. They seize their women as they do everything else, and impose on the captives the unenviable _rôle_ of slaves-of-all-work. Given the brutality of primitive man, the fate of the captured woman is necessarily of the hardest, and it is natural that the woman of the tribe should not solicit it. Thus, with or without reason, the Australian fells to the ground his captured wife, pierces her limbs with his javelin, etc. A stranger, a prisoner, violently brought into a society where she cannot count on a single friend, will evidently be more resigned to this bad treatment, and can nearly always be made to submit to it without resistance. But we must not accept this as a sufficient explanation of exogamy. We have seen that the Australian, accustomed to primitive rape in all its brutality, only has recourse to it when he cannot procure by simple barter the woman he covets. There is certainly great temptation to capture a woman. A man thereby escapes paying a price for her to her parents, which is the rule in nearly all savage countries, but the operation is not effected without risk and reprisals more or less dangerous, so that before undertaking it he thinks twice. We must be careful not to confound rape with marriage; nothing is more distinct with savage and even with civilised men. Perhaps even the dangers and the inconveniences of brutal capture have given rise to the idea of primitive conjugal barter, of a peaceful agreement by which a girl was ceded to a man for a compensation agreed upon. In principle this commercial transaction left to the husband the greater part of the rights he would have acquired by violent capture; but, in reality, these rights were necessarily mitigated, for the woman, being thus ceded in a friendly manner, was not completely abandoned by her own people. Thus in Polynesia, or at least in New Zealand, the husband who murdered his wife, although he had purchased her, incurred the revenge of her relations, unless she was guilty of adultery.[264] It was often thus, but not always, however; for with the Fijians, in delivering a daughter to the purchaser, the father or the brother said to the future husband, “If you become discontented with her, sell her, kill her, eat her; you are her absolute master.”[265] Much nearer home, in ancient Russia, the father at the moment of marriage gave his daughter some strokes with a whip, saying, “Henceforth, if you are not obedient, your husband will beat you.”[266]