bring them up from infancy, and thus the childhood of the world meant a
state in which the child had little place, save as a small, fierce
animal, whose development meant only a change from infancy and its
helplessness to boyhood and its capacity for fight.

Out of this chaos of discordant elements, struggling unconsciously
toward social form, emerged by slow degrees the tribe and the nation,
the suggestions of institutions and laws and the first principles of the
social state. Master and servant, employer and employed, became facts;
and dim suspicions as to economic laws were penetrating the minds of the
early thinkers. The earliest coherent thought on economic problems comes
to us from the Greeks, among whom economic speculation had begun almost
a thousand years before Christ. The problem of work and wages was even
then forming,--the sharply accented difference between theirs and ours
lying in the fact that for Greek and Roman and the earlier peoples in
the Indies economic life was based upon slavery, accepted then as the
foundation stone of the economic social system.

Up to the day when Greek thought on economic questions formulated, in
Aristotle's "Politics" and "Economics," the first logical statement of
principles, knowledge as to actual conditions for women is chiefly
inferential. When a slave, she was like other slaves, regarded as
soulless; and she still is, under Mohammedanism. As lawful wife she was
physically restrained and repressed, and mentally far more so. A Greek
matron was one degree higher than her servants; but her own sons were
her masters, to whom she owed obedience. A striking illustration of this
is given in the Odyssey. Telemachus, feeling that he has come to man's
estate, invades the ranks of the suitors who had for years pressed about
Penelope, and orders her to retire to her own apartments, which she does
in silence. Yet she was honored above most, passive and prompt obedience