he father and the mother--the former
to be loved and the latter to be reverenced. It would seem as if "they
assumed that fathers would be sufficiently reverenced if they were
loved, and mothers loved if they were honoured." How true here is the
understanding of affection and of the sexes!

If we pause for a moment to seek the reason why the Egyptians had, as
Herodotus so strikingly states, established in their domestic
relationships laws and customs different from the rest of mankind--the
answer is easy to find. The Egyptians were an agricultural and a
conservative people. They were also a pacific race. They would seem
not to have believed in that illusion of younger races--the glory of
warfare. I have seen it stated that in battle they were known for the
habit of running away. This may, of course, be thought to count
against them as a people. It depends entirely on the point of view
that is taken. But if, as I believe, the fighting activities belong to
an early and truly primitive stage of social development, then the
view would be very different. Races begin with the building up of
society, then there follows the period of warfare--the patriarchal
period which leads on to a later stage, much nearer in its working to
the first--a final period, as Havelock Ellis says, "the stage of
fruition." Woman's place and opportunity for the true expression of
the powers that are hers belong to the first and last of these stages;
in the middle stage she must tend to fall into a position of more or
less complete dependence on the fighting male. Here is, I think, the
explanation of the power and privilege of the Egyptian women. The
Egyptians, due to their pacific and conservative temperament, seem to
have escaped the patriarchal stage, and passed on from the first to
final stage. Through the long centuries of their civilisation they
devoted their energies to the building up and preserving of their
social organisation. Thus, it may be, came about that solving of the
problem of the sexes, which they among all races seem to have
accomplished. The relationships of their family life and domestic
administration were entirely civilised and humane.

Nowhere, except in Egypt, is so much stress laid upon the truth, that
authority is sustained by affection. Their monuments and the
inscriptions that have come down to us abundantly testify the value
set upon affection: it is always the love of the husband for the wife,
the wife for the husband,