. From the days of Lucretia,
the great Roman dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deep
into the night, and whose personal dignity was so dear to her that,
violated, she sought only death, to those of the mother of the Gracchi,
one of the last of the great line, we find everywhere, erect, labouring,
and resolute, the Roman woman who gave birth to the men who built up
Roman greatness. A few centuries later, and Rome also had reached that
dangerous spot in the order of social change which Greece had reached
centuries before her. Slave labour and the enjoyment of the unlimited
spoils of subject races had done away for ever with the demand for
physical labour on the part of the members of the dominant race. Then
came the period when the male still occupied himself with the duties
of war and government, of legislation and self-culture; but the Roman
matron had already ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in jewels and
fine clothing, brought at the cost of infinite human labour from the
ends of the earth, nourished on delicate victuals, prepared by others'
hands, she sought now only with amusement to pass away a life that no
longer offered her the excitement and joy of active productive exertion.
She frequented theatres or baths, or reclined on her sofa, or drove in
her chariot; and like more modern counterparts, painted herself, wore
patches, affected an artistic walk, and a handshake with the elbow
raised and the fingers hanging down. Her children were reared by
dependents; and in the intellectual labour and government of her age
she took small part, and was fit to take none. There were not wanting
writers and thinkers who saw clearly the end to which the enervation of
the female was tending, and who were not sparing in their denunciations.
"Time was," cries one Roman writer of that age, "when the matron turned
the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot in her eye
that the pottage might not be singed, but now," he adds bitterly,
"when the wife, loaded with jewels, reposes among pillows, or seeks the
dissipation of baths and theatres, all things go downward and the state
decays." Yet neither he nor that large body of writers and thinkers who
saw the condition towards which the parasitism of woman was tending
to reduce society, preached any adequate remedy. (Indeed, must not
the protest and the remedy in all such cases, if they are to be of any
avail, take their rise within the diseased class itself