loss by it.  It is true that parents will scold a daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest complete indifference to her conduct.  Maidens who no longer expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe decorum it is only out of respect to custom.”  Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the connection between the high estimates of virginity and the conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in his later work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (vol. ii, Ch.  XLII), after pointing out that “marriage by purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity,” he refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an unmarried girl “is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an offense against the parents or family of the girl,” and there is no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has been done to the woman herself.  Westermarck recognizes at the same time that the preference given to virgins has also a biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these Studies.)

It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A.B.  Ellis seems to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that wife-purchase should always accompany it.  The preference still persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property, among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase.  Under such conditions a woman’s chastity has an important social function to perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (The Morality of Marriage, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man’s property.  The fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial chastity in the husband.

It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case, there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails.  That has probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages.  The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits (Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, vol. v, p. 275), there is no complete continence before marriage, but neither is there any unbridled license.

The example of Tahiti is instructive as regards the prevalence of chastity among peoples