desired her not only as a female, but as a servant. She could work.

This is no light matter. The man's desire for the woman was already an enormous force. When we add to it the child's desire for his mother, because of what she could do for him, we have a new force to consider.

The man, meanwhile, could not work. He was a hunter and fighter, and most useful and necessary as such; but industry began with motherhood, in the care and service of the young. The mother serves the child, naturally, inevitably, because the child cannot care for itself. Legitimate service is for the young, the old, the sick; it is for incapacity. Service for the well and strong is illegitimate. A "servant" is a "debased mother," technically speaking.

It is now easy to follow the tempting steps by which early man slipped into a state of economic dependence upon the growing industrial powers of women. There was no conquest, no cruelty, no sudden change. He was still her mate and comrade, still did his part in bringing in his "kill" and keeping off enemies. But as she became more and more competent as a worker, she became more and more desirable as an economic asset. The point to note most carefully is that it is not a sudden subjugation of the female as a sex demand; it was a gradual taking advantage of the mother as an economic demand.

In mating, early man was probably monogamous, as are the higher apes. Indeed, the gorilla is next to us in that widening range of motherhood, which includes the older child with the new baby. Elephants also have the twoyear-old still with the mother and the new calf. Among lower species moth

erhood consists only in the repetition of baby service to successive relays of babies. With us it was not only that childhood lasted longer, but that one, two, or three children needed different kinds of care at the same time. That was the great developer of the brain of primitive woman. And as she learned to make moccasins and leggings for her oldest boy, why not for his father? As she boiled the pot and gave food to her children, why should not he have some?

It was as easy as that, as natural, as inevitable. Its advantage is evident. Man, the hunter and fighter, was obviously better off if he had a working mother to serve and care for him than if he had to stop fighting and take care of himself.

"Very good," triumphantly cries the upholder of the old relation. "You have said it. It was natural, it was beneficial. What more do you ask?"

We ask that the results be observed. Bear in mind that in the unrecorded generations of primitive life customs form easily and crystallize into unbreakable tribal laws. "Woman's work" was visibly different from man's, and so recognized. She had different tools, a separate status of her own. But man, being male, and therefore given to the pride natural to his sex, assumed his own activities of hunting and fighting to be nobler than hers, and thus learned to look down on woman. Not on the female; no male in nature despises the female. Even with us, when genuinely "in love," man looks up to woman. But after he marries her and she becomes his servant, can a man look up to his cook?

Polygamy was not practicable until

the keeping of cattle made large families safe, and when the use of cattle for breeding purposes made that process a staring example. We may find here the key to the later result of woman's economic appropriation, the misuse of sex.

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Where early agriculture was developed by women, with cattle kept also, the same results appeared. We see in Africa proof enough of the hopelessly low status of a people whose men only hunt and fight, and live on the work of women. In contrast note the different culture of the Samoan Islanders, for instance, where food is plentiful without labor, where hunting has small place, and where we find peace, plenty, and good manners, with large measure of equality and happiness between the sexes. There is small progress, to be sure, because social evolution requires the specialization of industry. The exploitation of sex followed upon the exploitation of service.

Any animal in captivity will change its habits, generally for the worse. Even rabbits, fertile enough when free, litter far more frequently when prisoners; the female cannot escape. Further, we may observe the behavior of that friend of man, the dog, and note the effect of interference with the natural balance of the sexes.

Visibly it was the working capacity of the mother which led to her enslavement, not the attraction of sex. The depth of our conviction as to woman's place being in the home goes back to motherhood. In sex attraction man has never been held fast by domesticity. No, his greatest charmers, those glittering names which have

come shining down through myth and history for thousands of years, as Helen and Cleopatra, are not associated with domestic industry. Our gilded youth marry chorus girls rather than parlor maids. But the charm of sex is one thing, and the charm of service is quite another. Arnold Bennett expressed this vividly when describing the attractions of Mrs. Alice Challis, her gentle sympathy and care for his comfort.

"He had probably eaten about fifteen thousand hotel breakfasts before Alice taught him what a real breakfast was."

"She was balm to Priam Farll. She might have been equally balm to King David, Uriah the Hittite, Socrates, Rousseau, Lord Byron, Heine, or Charlie Peace. Was she a lady? Pish! She was a woman.”

The luring advertisement fervidly, though ungrammatically, describes "Pies like mother used to make," while the remorseless betrayal of common jokes shows up the shortcomings of the bride.

The woman whose place is in the home is not necessarily the wife. She is primarily the mother, but may also be a grandmother, sister, daughter, granddaughter, niece, or maiden aunt. Failing these, the man must hire one. But paid or unpaid, the service he most enjoys is the service of women, and its salient quality is motherliness.

Monogamy, which is a natural method of mating, common among species where it is to the advantage of the young to have the care of both parents, is with us accompanied by a tendency to polygamy and even promiscuity on the part of the male; while the female has been so restricted and punished for any variation from

an enforced monogamy that we cannot fairly say how great has been the change effected in her.

But we do know that neither health nor happiness in this relation are the rule; that the high beauty of romantic love, our true ideal, is painfully rare; and that every form of excess, natural and unnatural, has been practised by that over-indulged child, "tyrant man," and shared, too often under compulsion, by his helpless assistant.

Meanwhile social evolution has gone on, despite this heavy disadvantage, with varying success. The most progressive races are marked by monogamy and comparative freedom for women, and one civilization after another has gone down in the weakness and corruption of gross promiscuity and over-indulgence.

The onward movement of society is advanced by the development of social service, of work done more competently, for more people, by a steadily improving specialization. With high professional ability, with manifold with manifold skilled workmanship, with the arts and sciences and new discoveries leading us on, the world improves.

Domestic service does not so improve. How can it? It is only by devoting oneself to one kind of work and following it for life, for many successive lives, that society is best served. Once we made our own houses, the hut, the tent, the tepee, each for himself. Men, specializing as masons, carpenters, painters, glaziers, plumbers, gas-fitters, electricians, decorators, have learned to build hall and temple, palace and theater, and the spacious, comfortable homes we know.

Meanwhile the mother, in domestic service, could not so specialize. Both house service and child service remain

unspecialized, performed by amateurs, necessarily and permanently incompetent. Motherhood, if free to socialize its industries, would long since have poured its mighty power in social service, providing efficiently for all children, to the immense improvement of the human race.

No matter how loving and devoted, a mother who is by profession a domestic servant has no better effect upon the race than would a father in the same profession. So far from holding that the mother is as such conveniently arranged to be the servant of the family, it should be held that the proper care of children is incompatible with housework.

If it is advanced that virtually all mothers do it, we have but to indicate the painfully unsatisfying product of their labors either in the health of the home-fed world or the appearance and behavior of the people they feed. The preparation of food began, it is true, with the mother's efforts to care for her young, many hundred thousand years ago. So did all the earliest industries. All the others have been socialized, to their high development. These vital basic needs, the feeding of the world and the improvement of the race through child culture, remain at the starting-post, save where the advances made by men have given us better utensils, stoves and tools of many kinds, and knowledge this last quite beyond the grasp of the grade of intelligence willing to stay in domestic service.

There is another result of man's taking advantage of the maternal services which affects our whole economic world. world. The value of a permanent

mother being recognized, the practical savage argued that two could do more

than one, and ten more than two; in his warfare he saved the women to work for him. Not the men, though it is commonly accepted as the origin of slavery that "the spared captive" was the first slave. But why make a slave of a man? He could not do anything but hunt and fight, he had no useful value, he was quarrelsome and dangerous.

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No, it was the peaceful and industrious women who were the first slaves. Then, becoming sex-slaves as well as industrial, their children could be raised as slaves, even the boys. Slave-born men are the result of woman slavery. Note the wide consequence. Custom, tradition, tribal law, formed fast in ancient times when no records existed of any other life than what they knew. The scorn of work as proper to women soon became deeper, as it was seen to belong still lower, and we learned to say, "Work was made for slaves."

Since slave labor has been the world's main supply throughout all history and far back of that, we having but outgrown it in our own country within a lifetime, this scorn of labor has become a settled race-tradition, a complex long established. The master scorned it, the slave hated it; there was enmity between them forever. Personally considered, this is bad enough, but socially its effects are far worse.

Our increasing "labor troubles," the pride and cruelty of the employing master, the rebellious hatred of the employed slave, show how little we have outgrown the enormous evil resultant upon the first error-the monopolization of mother service by the adult male.

Any open-minded person, able temporarily to think clearly, may observe that our main human distinction is shown in our work. The paleontologist hunts for fossil bones to show what kind of animals used to be; the archæologist hunts for ruins, the bones of dead societies, and measures the grade of the past civilization by the things they made. If we had nothing but teeth and claws and our own hair, we should not be human. A society needs a material body, and makes it.

Specialized work is social service, the most intimate, vital, absolutely important social service. Any one can see it; no one can deny it, but we do not feel it. Some lazy, dependent person, waited upon like a sick baby, will proudly say, "I do not have to work." Imagine a hulking bird eternally in the nest, fed by others and murmuring serenely, "I do not have to fly!" Or a fat fish under a rock shelf, fed by other fishes, and proclaiming, "I do not have to swim!"

The body politic consists of persons who work for one another in widely specialized labors. They are paid, each for himself, but the work they do, the thing they make, is for the others.

No one can be a member of society without some kind of social service. Those persons found among us, not socially serviceable, are either passive as parasites or virulent as disease.

The fact that half the people in the world have been kept at the primal level of domestic service has not wholly deprived them of usefulness, but has prevented its full development. Its effect upon man has been to keep him in his nonage, a big, strong creature, but unweaned. He remains childish, unwisely self-indulgent, passionate, and uncontrolled. He is fonder of play

than of work. One of the most startling proofs of our peculiar warped condition is in the immeasurable interest men take in their little games, children yet despite years.

It will be no easy matter to change a condition so long established, older even than civilization. But we have at last outgrown chattel slavery; there begins to be some recognition of "the dignity of labor"; and women are increasingly restive under the level restriction to one grade of service. The natural urge toward specialization, the pleasure of using individual talents, and being paid for it, is bringing more and more women from domestic service into social.

But domestic service suffers. Our home, as it has been, requires the complete devotion of one woman at least, and more if the man can afford it. These women who are escaping from the home are not doing much to improve it. It is perhaps natural that they should wish to leave altogether the work they have done so long. Nevertheless, that work, so far as it applies to children, is theirs forever.

They have no right to shirk their task, but they have a demanding duty to bring it up to the level of our civilization, to make it a high social service. So far as domestic service includes child service it cries aloud for specialization and will get it. So far as it deals with man service, he will cry aloud for his house-mother, but in vain.

The women of our time are right in resenting their restriction to the primitive activities of the kitchen and nursery. They are traitorously wrong if they fail to perform those duties better.

It is the work of mothers to care for

children, and it is to the disgrace of modern motherhood that so many children are improperly cared for. This is not to be done by trusting to primitive methods suitable to solitary animals; it calls for human motherhood, which is social service.

It is the work of mothers to feed their children, and similarly it is a disgrace to modern motherhood that they allow so many children to grow up ill fed, and millions to die by famine. Again this is not a matter for solitary primitive motherhood to set right; human motherhood is social, and our children are social orphans for lack of it.

No yearning love, no endless labor at stove and tub, can properly care for the children of the world. They need educated, organized, specialized motherhood, in addition to the basic relation between individual mother and child.

Child culture is the highest form of social service. It calls for the subtlest, noblest powers, for sharp genius at its upper levels, and clear talent in all teachers. No matter what the race may learn, may make, may do, may discover, all our gain is naught if the people remain weak, foolish, evilly behaved.

The business of women is to make better people through a far higher standard of breeding, of environment, of education. No nobler task can be imagined than the upbuilding of a nobler race. But this is social service, not domestic.

And will men be happy with different women, different children, different homes? We may answer by another question: Are they so happy now that they should fear a change?