e to account for this
peculiar view on other grounds.

Again, where in Japan a girl, to maintain her parents, is justified in
leading a life of shame, we have a peculiar ethical standard difficult
for Western minds to appreciate. Yet in such an instance as is described
in "Auld Robin Gray," we see precisely the same code; the girl, to
benefit her parents, marries a rich old man she does not love--which is
to lead a life of shame. The ethical view which justifies this, puts the
benefit of parents above the benefit of children, robs the daughter of
happiness and motherhood, injures posterity to assist ancestors.

This is one of the products of that very early religion, ancestor
worship; and here we lay a finger on a distinctly masculine influence.

We know little of ethical values during the matriarchate; whatever they
were, they must have depended for sanction on a cult of promiscuous
but efficient maternity. Our recorded history begins in the patriarchal
period, and it is its ethics alone which we know.

The mother instinct, throughout nature, is one of unmixed devotion, of
love and service, care and defence, with no self-interest. The animal
father, in such cases as he is of service to the young, assists the
mother in her work in similar fashion. But the human father in the
family with the male head soon made that family an instrument of desire,
and combat, and self-expression, following the essentially masculine
impulses. The children were his, and if males, valuable to serve and
glorify him. In his dominance over servile women and helpless children,
free rein was given to the growth of pride and the exercise of
irresponsible tyranny. To these feelings, developed without check for
thousands of years, and to the mental habits resultant, it is easy to
trace much of the bias of our early ethical concepts.

Perhaps it is worth while to repeat here that the effort of this book
is by no means to attribute a wholly evil influence to men, and a wholly
good one to women; it is not even claimed that a purely feminine culture
would have advanced the world more successfully. It does claim that the
influence of the two together is better than that of either one alone;
and in especial to point out what special kind of injury is due to the
exclusive influence of one sex heretofore.

We have to-day reached a degree of human development where both men and
women are capable of seeing over and across the distinctions of sex,
and m