ip of the aged in religious circles. The Popes
of to-day begin their high service at an age that is in many positions
a "dead line." The hardening of the social arteries in religion,
government, politics, and law, however, while making old men more sure
of their place in life, made old women less valued and worse treated.
The ages of mediaeval experience and of the feudal order, until
chivalry began to affect the sex-relation, show almost unbelievable
cruelty toward many aged women. The idea of the church fathers that
women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often
assumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence
from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers.
And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches
compact with Satan. Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard
conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely
old but also given to nervous prostration (before that title appeared
in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned,
drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems
almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in
history.

=Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.=--The young woman, being
necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on
of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill
treatment. The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not
only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were
at all "highstrung" or "meddling." Hence the natural conception, in a
time of superstitious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with
those spirits made her seem a danger to society. The history of the
witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that
delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that
nightmare of human ignorance.

Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved
and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and
the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their
sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found
useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of
experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members
of the family circle. Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these.

The waste of old age in women, however, is, as ha