assisted them in the administration of its affairs, notwithstanding that pressure was brought to prohibit it. But with the spread of Christianity all was changed and lost for woman. Cato once said, “had there been no women in the world, the gods would still have been dwelling with us," but Cato was a poor philosophical guide, for the preponderance of evidence shows that the gods and men and state decline with the loss of woman's influence, and the Roman city-state, like Athens and Sparta, passed away.

The fundamental basis on which patriarchy rested, it will be noticed, was the claim of the sole parentage of the father. This was also the fundamental basis of matriarchy, but there was this great difference that matriarchy was not founded on a claim made by woman to exclude man's right of parentage. In her case it was ignorance of the truth, an ignorance shared equally by both man and woman, and there is no echo of any struggle that she engaged in to - withhold his proprietary rights once they were known. A 'glance at the animal world will show that among those species of birds in which the male assumes some of the responsibilities of parenthood the female accepts his assistance without protest or jealousy.

It is highly improbable that her female descendant acted otherwise. She had taken man in in those

early days of ignorance, and had given him the benefits of her labours. She had made the clothes he wore and the tent covering which sheltered him equally with her children and herself. The fact that every man was some woman's child would completely preclude any possibility of contest. Contest was not a biological endowment of the female. The only struggles she engaged in were those dictated by a desire to shelter and protect those dependent on her. In the case of man, however, it was wholly different. His one asset was to seize and hold, exclusively for himself, all that he could grasp, first by muscle and afterwards by that mental sophistry in which he is a past master.

How completely the pendulum swung to the other side when man knew of his parenthood is well illustrated by the trial of Orestes in the play of schylus. The mother of Orestes, Clytemnestra, had murdered her husband, Agamemnon, and Orestes, in turn, killed his mother to avenge his father's death. When prosecuted for it, Orestes asked why they did not also proceed against Clytemnestra for the crime she had committed. He was told that punishment was due only to those who took the lives of relatives, and that no blood relation existed between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. Orestes turns this to his own advantage and claims that, by that very fact, he also is

immune, as he is related to his father but not to his mother. He was supported in this view by the majority of the gods of the pantheon and was acquitted.

The more advanced western nations are in the throes of the closing of the patriarchate, and the useless struggle that is being waged is a strong endorsement by man himself of his own inherent and inherited selfishness and vanity. But any struggle that man engages in with woman is an unequal contest. The last century is strewn with the evidences of his incapacity to resist her demands. One by one he has been forced to yield, for the "fulness of time" is once more accomplishing what was decreed from the very beginning by the Eternal Mind, that husband and wife, man and woman, must be one in power, one in authority, one in will to do His will and to accomplish His work. Not matriarchate and not patriarchate, but matriarchate and patriarchate must move forward in obedience to the Divine fiat.

IV

MAN AS RULER

SO FAR we have considered man only in his relation to woman, and we have seen that in all countries all classes of men, regardless of intellect, education, or social standing-from the framers of the law to the lowest slaves-have oppressed and abused her. We shall now take a hurried glance at him as ruler and law maker, as history has portrayed him. Here we are on terra firma. We have passed completely from the region of the speculative, from inductive or deductive logic, to fact, and here we find the strongest support for anything and everything that has been assumed in previous chapters as true of the earlier life of our ancestors.

It must be borne in mind that there has never been any break in the continuity of events since life began on the globe. In every field of activity, whether physical, industrial, or mental, whether social, political, religious or domestic, the mode of procedure has been the same; namely, a gradual evolving of the first germ of thought or action to a higher, deeper, and broader conception, and in orderly sequence, from the simple to the more complex, modified, necessarily, by environment but with its basic fact unchanged. There have been no great strides, no radical changes;

however revolutionary progress may sometimes seem to be, it will be found on examination, that every step has been registered, and that each was the natural offspring of what went before and the parent of what came after. Unorganised society was the horde, then came the gens or family, then the clan-the family with its collateral branches-then the tribe which consisted of a confederation of the clans, and lastly, the incipient state on a territorial basis. But the passing from the tribe to the state, from communal to individual ownership, was a slow, tentative process, and the state is still evolving and can only move forward at the rate of the average intelligence of its units.

The change of government from the absolute rule of woman to the absolute rule of man, like that from horde to gens and gens to state, was a very gradual one, and was made step by step with all possible shades of division of authority. This is one of the facts that has misled so many sociologists and caused them to deny and ridicule the theory that woman ever exercised anything more than a partial and limited authority. They have not reckoned with man's inherited tendencies as the ultimate factor that settled the momentous question of who should be the future ruler; but muscle freely exercised was a powerful means of increasing his influence, and finally led to his assuming all authority.