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 
