THE STATUS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN 441 



mitigated despotism there are fixed ranks, obedience the most pro- 

 found, marks of subordination amounting to worship; there is an 

 organized military system with its grades of officers ; the lower 

 classes exist only to supply necessaries to the warrior-classes, whose 

 sole business is war, merciless in its character and accompanied by 

 cannibalism. And here, along with prevalent polygyny, carried 

 among the chiefs to the extent of from ten to a hundred wives, we 

 find the position of women such that, not only are they, as among the 

 lowest savages, "little better than beasts of burden," and not only 

 may tliey be sold at pleasure, but a man may kill and eat his wife if 

 he pleases. Contrariwise, in Samoa the type of the regulating sys- 

 tem has become in a considerable degree industrial. There is repre- 

 sentative government, and chieftains, exercising authority under con- 

 siderable restraint, are i^artly elective ; while the industrial organiza- 

 tion is so far developed that there are journeymen and apprentices, 

 there is payment for labor, and there are even strikes, with a rudi- 

 mentary trades-unionism. And here, beyond that improvement of 

 women's status implied by limitation of their labors to the lighter 

 kinds while men take the heavier, there is the improvement implied 

 by the fact that " the husband has to provide a dowry, as well as 

 the wife, and the dowry of each must be pretty nearly of equal value," 

 and by the fact that a couple who have lived together for years make, 

 at separation, a fair division of the property. Of other compound 

 societies fit for comparison, I may name two in America, North and 

 South, the Iroquois and the Araucanians. Though these, alike in 

 degree of composition, were both formed by combination in war 

 against civilized invaders, yet, in their social structures, they differed 

 in the respect that the Araucanians became decidedly militant in 

 their regulative organization, while the Iroquois did not give their 

 regulative organization the militant form; for the govei-ning agen- 

 cies, general and local, were in the one personal and hereditary and in 

 the other representative. Now, though these two peoples were much 

 upon a par in the division of labor between the sexes the men 

 limiting themselves to war, the chase, and fishing, leaving to the 

 women the labors of the field and the house yet along with the freer 

 political type of the Iroquois there went a freer domestic type; as 

 shown by the facts that the women had separate proprietary rights, 

 that they took with them the children in cases of separation, and that 

 marriages were arranged by the mothers. No definite evidence either 

 way is furnished by the doubly-compound societies of ancient Amei-- 

 ica. The political organization of Mexico was in a high degree mili- 

 tant in type; but along with it there went an elaborate industrial 

 organization, with extensive division of labor and considerable com- 

 mercial intercourse ; and, excepting in the polygyny and concubinage 

 of the upper classes, and occasional inheritance of wives as property, 

 the position of women appears to have been not bad. The Peruvian 



