and since the action of jealousy is so strong in the
animal kingdom, it cannot be supposed to have been dormant among
primitive men. Rather, in the infancy of his history this passion must
have acted with very great intensity. Thus it becomes impossible to
accept any theory of the community of women in the earliest stage of
the family. For inevitably such peaceful association would be broken
up by jealous battles among the males, in which the strongest member
would kill or drive away his rivals.

Great stress is laid, by the supporters of promiscuity, on the danger
that such conflicts must have been to the growing community. It is,
therefore, held that in order to prevent this check on their
development, it was necessary for the male members not to give way to
jealousy, but to be content with promiscuous ownership of women. But
this is surely to credit savage man with a control of the driving
jealous instinct that he could not then have had? What we do not find
in the sexual conduct of men, as they now are, cannot be credited as
existing in the infancy of social life. We fall into many mistakes in
judging these questions of sex; we under-estimate the strength of
love-passion--the uncounted ancestral forces dating back to the
remote beginnings of life. Doubtless conflicts over the possession of
women were frequent from the beginning of man's history. But these
disputes would not lead to promiscuous intercourse, only to a change
in the tyrant male, who ruled over the women in the group.

Another fact against a belief in promiscuity is that the lowest
savages known to us are not promiscuous, in so far as there is no
proved case of the sexual relations being absolutely unregulated. They
all recognise sets of women with whom certain sets of men can have no
marital relations. Again these savages are very far removed from the
state of man's first emergence from the brute, as is proved by their
combination into large and friendly tribes. Such peaceful aggregation
could only have arisen at a much later period, and after the males had
learnt by some means to control their brute appetites and jealousy of
rivals in that movement towards companionship, which, first resting in
the sexual needs, broadens out into the social instincts.

For these reasons, then, we conclude that the theory of a friendly
union having existed among males in the primitive group is the very
reverse of the truth. This question has now been sufficiently pr