Purchase, which kept the twain together in nearness to one or the other side of the family line, was usually best for women; especially when, as often happened, it gave her the protection of her own blood relations.

Capture, on the other hand, made woman not only the possession of her husband in a peculiar sense as separating her from all who might, through the working of natural affection, act as her helpers in time of need, but made it possible for the slavery of the wife to the husband to take on more cruel forms.

Although, it must be said, even capture gave a few women of superlative charm a chance to take precedence of common wives gained in the usual manner.
Two influences, one from the custom to allow marriages only within a certain blood bond, and one to allow marriages only outside that family relationship, have worked in the first instance to preserve certain racial traits from extinction, and in the second place to mix the common elements of human nature to the enrichment of the common stock.

This balancing regard for the known and allurement of the novel has also worked to give manifold forms of family association, since those customs were superseded.
It would seem that not only were "trial marriages" for individuals an ancient, not at all a modern device, to see how the twain could get along together, but varying trial forms of marriage for racial, tribal, and national groups have made all manner of experiments to see what on the whole would serve best the social need in the family relationship.
That process of wide experimentation at last settled into the ideal and practice of one father-head, at least, even if still allowing more than one wife and mother within its bond.

That father-head seems to have found his place only on condition of grant from society of complete authority over wife and children.
=The Patriarchal Family.=--The patriarchal family, which Sir Henry Maine described so well, but which he mistakenly supposed to be the first great type of familial association, placed firmly at the centres of social order the power and responsibility of the man.