As an argument in support of his theory that the influence of women was never supreme, Sir John Lubbock alludes to the position of Australian women as being one of “complete subjection,” and as the native Australians represent perhaps the lowest existing stage of human society, he doubtless thinks his argument unassailable. However, that the position of Australian women cannot be taken as a reliable guide in estimating primitive womanhood is shown by the writer’s own reasoning when he says: It must not be assumed, however, that the condition of primitive man is correctly represented by even the lowest of existing races. The very fact that the latter have remained stationary, that their manners, habits, and mode of life have continued almost unaltered for generations, has created a strict, and often complicated, system of customs, from which the former was necessarily free, but which has in some cases gradually acquired even more than the force of law.[145] [145] _Origin of Civilization_, p. 2. Yet we find him comparing primitive women with this race which for thousands upon thousands of years, because of its environment, or through some cause which is not understood, has been unable to advance. While this writer perceives clearly that foreign women were much more desirable for wives than those belonging to a man’s own tribe, he has not been able to discover the reason why this was so, but, continuing to babble about the “rights” of the men of the group, overlooks the fact that native-born women were free, and as only those women who had first been torn from their friends and shorn of their independence could at this stage of human existence be forced into the position of wife, it became necessary to secure them by violence from surrounding tribes. He is not blind to the fact that it was a desire to extend the limit of conjugal liberties on the part of males which prompted wife-capture; yet he would have us believe that although women were absolutely independent of men, and although they were the recognized heads of families, and the source whence originated all the privileges of the gens, it was in no degree owing to their influence that the conjugal liberties of males were restricted within the tribe, but, on the contrary, that this restriction was enforced out of regard for the “proprietary rights” of the men of the group. He says: “We must remember that under the communal system the women of the tribe were all common property. No one could appropriate one of them to himself without infringing on the general rights of the tribe.”