Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/457

Rh mitigated despotism there are fixed ranks, obedience the most profound, 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 they be sold at pleasure, but a man may kill and eat his wife if he pleases. Contrariwise, in Samoa the type of the regulating system has become in a considerable degree industrial. There is representative government, and chieftains, exercising authority under considerable restraint, are partly elective; while the industrial organization is so far developed that there are journeymen and apprentices, there is payment for labor, and there are even strikes, with a rudimentary 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 governing agencies, 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 America. The political organization of Mexico was in a high degree militant in type; but along with it there went an elaborate industrial organization, with extensive division of labor and considerable commercial 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