consideration and this was maintained by the female
heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he
would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her
family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became
the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.

Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually
acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his
"possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of
conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized
idea of "earning."

Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this
respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost
general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence
as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he
kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy
with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his
wife's person.

In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity
within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide
under these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a
martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are
given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had
taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the
following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found
prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your
silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How
much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these
pestilential marauders?"

Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in
defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The
inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the
average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of
man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of
free-will.

Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the
possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more
ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.

Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what
constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same
idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so mu