In seeking a reason to explain why force rather than persuasion was used in the consummation of early marriages, we have to remember the wide difference existing between the position of free women and that of those who were obliged to accept the _ba’al_ form of marriage. If, as we have reason to believe, as late as the beginning of the second or Middle Status of barbarism, instead of following the father of her children to his house as his slave, a woman remained in a home owned, or at least controlled jointly by herself, her mother, her sisters, and her daughters, it is plain that a state of female independence existed which was incompatible with female subjection. Add to this the fact that a woman’s children belonged exclusively to herself, or to her family, and that all hereditary honours and rights of succession were traced through females, and we have a set of circumstances which would seem sufficient to explain why force was necessary to bring women into the marital relation. That the capture of women for wives arose because the independence of free women was a bar to the gratification of the lower instincts in man, can, in the presence of all the facts at hand, scarcely be doubted; and that women submitted to the position of wife only when obliged to do so, or when deprived of liberty and dragged from home and friends, is only too apparent. While modesty as a cause for capture may not account for the resistance of the relations, the sacrifice of a daughter may serve to explain even this knotty point. If the capture of a free and independent girl from her mother by a band of marauders from a hostile tribe for purposes of the most degrading slavery, cannot account for the resistance of the mother-in-law, among most of the so-called lower races, then indeed it is difficult to conjecture any provocation or any set of circumstances which can account for it. This writer’s assertion that it is “contrary to all experience that female delicacy diminishes with civilization,” proves conclusively that he regards the slight degree of reserve which he is pleased to accredit to women in modern times, as a result of civilization—a civilization, too, which he evidently considers as wholly the result of masculine achievement; in other words, he doubtless thinks that the degree of self-respect observed among women at the present time is the result not of the innate tendencies in the female constitution, but of masculine tuition and training, an assumption which, when viewed by the light which in recent years has been thrown upon the development of the two diverging sex columns, is as absurd as it is arrogant and false. Some time will doubtless elapse before Sir John Lubbock and the class of writers which he represents will be willing to admit that civilization has been possible only because of the checks to the animal nature of the male, which are the natural result of the maternal instinct.