The Tibetan People 155
globes all his own personal rights and properties, he would be held to a duty which works in favour of all. It may further be supposed that the impossibility of maintaining strict observance of the marriage tie, under these conditions of absence, which must have been more frequent in the past than now, has led to the practical course of legalising, and thus controlling to good ends, an irregularity which would otherwise breed destructive jealousies and cloud titles of descent. The whole thing may be viewed as an example of family co-operation carried beyond the limits familiar to us, because the conditions producing family co-operation in any degree are likewise carried beyond all limits familiar to us.
The very rigour of nature's restraints in Tibet has required a more flexible marriage scheme. As there is no such thing as specific morality in the abstract, so there is, in the discussion of this system, no other reasonable inquiry than this—Would the substitution of some other system, as ours for example, be followed by greater or less product of human happiness—happiness in this world ? That deep-searching question will not be discussed in these pages. It is sufficient to say that the best observers have reported no special, considerable evil as traceable to polyandry, and that, in general, social conditions are, in the long run, adjusted, for the best good, to the controlling physical conditions — that " best good " never resulting in an extermination, but only an alleviation of inherent evil in our lives. We, the strong, should be therefore slow to impose our methods upon those whose relations to material nature are widely different from our own.
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