To sum up shortly, we have ten against four statements in favour of indiscriminate ill-treatment of wives. But, if we reduce both these figures by using only reliable ones, we have four against three in favour of good treatment. By closer analysis we find that ill-treatment is--in the primitive state of the aboriginal society--in most cases probably a form of regulated intra-family justice; and that although the methods of treatment in general are very harsh, still they are applied to much more resistant natures and should not be measured by the standard of our ideas and our nerves. For otherwise we should not understand how the feature of happiness, which is reported by nearly all our informants, could be present. 3. These considerations directly lead us up to an answer to our last question, viz. whether there is a kind of _mutual affection_ or whether there is only the power of the man, and the legal factors, that bind the consorts together. In the first place, it is well to bear in mind that in this respect there must have been a great variety of cases corresponding to the characters of the individuals concerned. We only ask here, therefore, the quite general question whether, as implied in some statements, there was an absolute absence of any kind of personal feeling in all Australian families and the wife considered her husband as her master only and her natural enemy, she being merely his slave. But here we find also that the few statements (Curr, Eyre, Meyer, Mitchell) that imply such an opinion are not very clear and explicit (in this category we include all the statements as to slavery and drudgery which can possibly embrace not only the treatment itself but the underlying feelings); whereas there are ten statements (Howitt, Bonney, Dawson, Lumholtz, J. D. Lang, Salvado, Turnbull, Grey, Mathew, Macgillivray)[213] which affirm that there is real affection between husband and wife. Some of them come from our most reliable writers and are very explicit (Howitt, Bonney, Lumholtz, Salvado). As what has been said of the treatment refers indirectly to this point (for treatment is regulated by personal feelings and not by tribal authority), we may say that the assumption of a complete lack of any feelings of affection or attachment does not seem very plausible. That these feelings would show themselves in another way than in our society seems beyond doubt. But that they would be completely absent and their places taken only by fear and awe--that is not in agreement with our evidence. Even judging on this question _a priori_, we could hardly suppose that there would be a complete absence of all factors that tend to create mutual affection between consorts. In the first place we may remember that in many cases the motive of sexual love was not absent from the aboriginal marriages. This was apparently always the case in marriages by elopement, which occurred in all tribes and was, under certain