nd, a race with reason and high moral
feeling beats a race with reason but without high moral feeling. And
the two are palpably consistent.

There is every reason, therefore, to suppose pre-historic man to be
deficient in much of sexual morality, as we regard that morality. As to
the detail of 'primitive marriage' or 'NO marriage,' for that is pretty
much what it comes to, there is of course much room for discussion.
Both Mr. M'Clennan and Sir John Lubbock are too accomplished reasoners
and too careful investigators to wish conclusions so complex and
refined as theirs to be accepted all in a mass, besides that on some
critical points the two differ. But the main issue is not dependent on
nice arguments. Upon broad grounds we may believe that in pre-historic
times men fought both to gain and to keep their wives; that the
strongest man took the best wife away from the weaker man; and that if
the wife was restive, did not like the change, her new husband beat
her; that (as in Australia now) a pretty woman was sure to undergo many
such changes, and her back to bear the marks of many such
chastisements; that in the principal department of human conduct (which
is the most tangible and easily traced, and therefore the most
obtainable specimen of the rest) the minds of pre-historic men were not
so much immoral as UNmoral: they did not violate a rule of conscience,
but they were somehow not sufficiently developed for them to feel on
this point any conscience, or for it to prescribe to them any rule.

The same argument applies to religion. There are, indeed, many points
of the greatest obscurity, both in the present savage religions and in
the scanty vestiges of pre-historic religion. But one point is clear.
All savage religions are full of superstitions founded on luck. Savages
believe that casual omens are a sign of coming events; that some trees
are lucky, that some animals are lucky, that some places are lucky,
that some indifferent actions--indifferent apparently and indifferent
really--are lucky, and so of others in each class, that they are
unlucky. Nor can a savage well distinguish between a sign of 'luck' or
ill-luck, as we should say, and a deity which causes the good or the
ill; the indicating precedent and the causing being are to the savage
mind much the same; a steadiness of head far beyond savages is required
consistently to distinguish them. And it is extremely natural that they
should believe so. They are playin