Such conditions, as we proved in our own experience of slavery, benumb
spiritual perception and make clear vision impossible; and it is plain
that if the mass of workers had neither political nor social place,
woman, the slave of the slave, had even less. Her wage had never been
fixed. That she had right to one had entered no imagination. To the end
of Greek civilization a wage remained the right of free labor only. The
slave, save by special permit of the master, had right only to bare
subsistence; and though men and women toiled side by side, in mine or
field or quarry, there was, even with the abolition of slavery, small
betterment of the condition of women. The degradation of labor was so
complete, even for the freeman, that the most pronounced aversion to
taking a wage ruled among the entire educated class. Plato abhorred a
sophist who would work for 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