Page:May Walden - Woman and Socialism (1909).pdf/5

Rh that all of our institutions change as the form of industry changes. But to explain this to you, I shall have to take you back to the beginning of the world's history.

Society has not always been in the stage in which we find it to-day. Pick up any tool with which you are familiar, a needle or a hammer, and think where it came from. You have never seen it in any other form. You have seen needles of different sizes and hammers of various shapes, but they have been made of the same metal. Did you ever think what the beginnings of those tools were? Were they always made of steel, brightly polished and bought from a dealer for a few cents?

No, they were invented ages and ages ago: so far back in the childhood of the race that no one knows the exact date of their invention, except that it was in what those wise men, the geologists (who can read in the rocks the history of the earth and her people) call the Stone Age.

In order to make clear the progress of the human race from its infancy to the present time, let us follow the classification made by Lewis H. Morgan, who was known in Europe as the foremost American scientist, though hie name is familiar to few of his countrymen.

He divides the life of mankind upon the earth into three distinct periods: First, savagery ; second, barbarism, and third, civilization. Savagery and barbarism he again subdivides into three periods each, which he describes as the lower, middle, and upper status.