The widely diffused practice of =wife-lending= and =wife-exchange= is also connected with the conditions of group marriage. In Hawaii, in Australia, among the Massai and the Herero in South Africa, we encounter this custom, but more especially in Angola and at the mouth of the Congo, also in North-Eastern Asia, and among many tribes of North American Indians. Schurtz points out that similar conditions may arise among European proletariat in consequence of inadequate housing accommodation. In this state of a somewhat limited promiscuity the only natural tie was that between mother and child. The child belonged exclusively to the mother, and therefore, in the wider sense, belonged to his mother’s totem. As Bachofen proved in his celebrated work,[161] in primeval times, and among many primitive tribes even at the present day, the “=mother-right=” (matriarchy), founded upon purely sensual, non-individual relations, was predominant; and only with the appearance of freer, more spiritual, more individual relations between the sexes (though this did not necessarily involve the development of monogamy) was “mother-right” first superseded by “father-right” (patriarchy). These recent ethnological researches have proved the untenability of Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity; it is no longer possible to doubt the fact of a primitive sex-companionship, taking the form of a more or less limited promiscuity of sexual intercourse. Ludwig Stein also lays stress on this view.[162] The sexual relationships of the primeval hordes were either quite unregulated, or regulated only to a very small extent. In this view of the matter there is nothing in any sense degrading to the human race; on the contrary, in the development of individual, enduring relationships between man and woman out of a condition of primitive promiscuity, we see manifested a continuous progression from lower to higher social forms of the sexual relationships, a gradual improvement and ennoblement of these relationships, until the development of monogamic marriage (which even to-day is merely an ideal state, since the reality does not correspond to it, or the original pure idea has been falsified and obscured). The transition from matriarchy, resting on a purely natural basis, in which women assumed a leading social position, and often also a leading political position, to patriarchy, in which the spiritual and the individual relationships were brought into the foreground, signified a great step forward in the developmental history of marriage. Bachofen was the first to recognize the profound importance in the history of civilization and for the spiritual and social life of humanity of this transition of the mother-right to the father-right, from matriarchy to patriarchy. Schurtz found the following formula to express the change: