In some Polynesian islands,
among the wild tribes of India as well as the Hindoos, in various
parts of Africa, the law of exogamy prevails, and wherever it exists
it forms a serious obstacle to free choice--_i.e._, free love, in the
proper sense of the expression. As Herbert Spencer remarks,
"The exogamous custom as at first established [being
connected with capture] implies an extremely abject
condition of women; a brutal treatment of them; an entire
absence of the higher sentiments that accompany the
relations of the sexes."
While exogamy thwarts love by minimizing the chances of intimate
acquaintance and genuine courtship, there is another form of sexual
taboo which conversely and designedly frustrates the tendency of
intimate acquaintance to ripen into passion and love. Though we do not
know just how the horror of incest arose, there can be no doubt that
there must be a natural basis for so strong and widely prevalent a
sentiment.
In so far as this horror of incest prevents the marriage of near
relatives, it is an obstacle to love that must be commended as
doubtless useful to the race. But when we find that in China there are
only 530 surnames, and that a man who marries a woman of the same
surname is punished for the crime of "incest"; that the Church under
Theodosius the Great forbade the union of relatives to the seventh
degree; that in many countries a man could not wed a relative by
marriage; that in Rome union with an adopted brother or sister was as
rigidly forbidden as with a real sister or brother;--when we come
across such facts we see that artificial and foolish notions regarding
incest must be added to the long list of agencies that have retarded
the growth of free choice and true love.
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