That even this ingeniously flexible system has not been able to prevent the considerable development of prostitution goes without saying. That is a bye-product of all systems, or rather it is the fixed and necessary product of forces planted in us when we were indiscriminate as are the unpropertied beasts, and even more indiscriminate than we shall be when socialism shall have swept away private property and marriage with it. The nested wild bird, the laired lion, and the housed man—those who have individually built or pre-empted houses for themselves and their young, these are mated. But the man-protected barnyard fowl, the unsheltered grazing herds, and the state-protected man, these are or will be carelessly indiscriminate. And as we never find a human society that is not in transition, bearing marks of dead processes, so we never find a perfectly symmetrical, definite marriage-system, or property-system (these two are wedded), but we must ever find irregularities, exceptions, vermiform appendices.
Our European-American world is one of private property, tempered by state ownership and adventure to wild land. Its marriage-system is one of monogamy, tempered by adultery, with adventure into the indiscriminate relation.
It is not improbable that other influences than those just described have conspired to the establishment of polyandry ; as, for example, the need of protecting women and children when separated for long periods from that portion of the male population which must be occupied in caring for distant flocks. If one of three could remain, having at heart the supreme interest of the Family, which en-
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