wages. A gift was legitimate, but pay
ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all
labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had
sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and
even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and
retrogression, it lingers still.

The ancients were, in the nature of things, all fighters. Even when
slavery for both the Aryan and Semitic races ended, two orders still
faced each other: aristocracy on the one side, claiming the fruits of
labor; the freeman on the other, rebelling against injustice, and
forming secret unions for his own protection,--the beginning of the
co-operative principle in action.

Thus much for the Greek. Turn now to the second great civilization, the
Roman. During the first centuries after the founding of Rome the Roman
woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of
the Grecian. With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more
social but still no legal freedom was accorded. The elder Cato
complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father
of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but
in spite of this remonstrance, a movement for the better had begun.
Under the Empire, woman acquired the right of inheritance, but she
herself remained a minor, and could dispose of nothing without the
consent of her guardian. Sir Henry Maine[3] calls attention to the
institution known to the oldest Roman law as the "Perpetual Tutelage of
Women," under which a female, though relieved from her parent's
authority by his decease, continues subject through life. Various
schemes were devised to enable her to defeat ancient rules; and by their
theory of "Natural Law," the jurisconsults had evidently assumed the
equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity.

Few more significant words or words more teeming with importance on the
actual economic condition of women have ever been written than those of
the great jurist whose name counts as almost final authority. "Ancient
law," he writes, "subordinates the woman to her blood relations, while a
prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been her subordination to
her husband." Under the modified laws as to marriage, he goes on to
state, there came a time "when the situation of the Roman female,
unmarried or married, became one of great personal and proprietary
indepen