28 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 



warfare means prisoners, and there is one thing more satisfying 

 to a savage victor than to kill his prisoner and use his skull for 

 a drinking bowl, and that is to take him home and turn him over 

 as a slave to his savage wife, who is not slow to make him per- 

 form her labor and to vent upon him the abuse she has so often 

 suffered herself, and which she and her children so well know 

 how to bestow. 



Imagine the satisfaction with which a victorious savage would 

 regard the chief of a rival tribe whom he had brought as a 

 present to his wife, as he saw him day after day doing the 

 work of women ! Imagine, too, the satisfaction of the woman 

 in having the opportunity to belabor a man and perhaps encour- 

 age the children to practice cruelty upon him whom they had 

 once learned to dread as a great warrior. 



It is a hard picture, this primitive slavery, but it is only under 

 conditions such as these that the savage man and the barbarian 

 woman first came to stand on terms of equality ; thus it is that 

 slavery was the first emancipation of woman, and it is this in- 

 stitution, bad as it is, that first made leisure possible to woman- 

 kind, and gave her honorable standing in the eyes of man. 

 With the later chapters of slavery and its degradation to both 

 races we are more familiar, but we cannot afford to forget, in 

 our horror of this now extinct institution, the great service it 

 once rendered to woman when the world was young. 



What animals have done for us. The want of space does not 

 permit the expansion of this thought, but it is one to which 

 young people may well give some special study, for animals not 

 only give their bodies and body products to be consumed, but 

 they toil day after day for our advantage. 



With the recent mechanical inventions, the business of carry- 

 ing both freight and men has been largely removed from our 

 animals, especially in our most highly civilized countries. And 

 yet we do not forget the pony express of our western plains, 

 nor fail to remember that it was within the memory of men 

 yet living that the patient ox toiled day after day to drag endless 



