Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/353

Rh Woman's work, some of which had passed on to the virile stage, was of the first rank in curiously-wrought pottery and in textiles made from paca wool, one of the finest staples, as their delicate spindle whorls will attest.

But these Peruvian uplands were the training grounds of men especially. Together the earth, the air, the waters, the tropical day, conspired to develop them. The sun was their chief deity, source of life and power, so their principal chiefs were its earthly viceregents. The barbarous and bloody rites of Mexico were absent, as were the graphic system and the pictorial literature. But the monuments of a departed glory remain.

Did space permit, the Eastern Hemisphere might also be put upon the stand as to its treatment of men and women from area to area. It surely can not be an accident that, before artificialized transportation interrupted the ancient regime, centers of culture and refinement survived for millenniums. Pastoral regions, land-locked seas, rice fields, bamboo jungles, above all, granite and marble quarries, are even now surviving and drawing around them the same refined spirits as of old.

This recital would be without a moral if it did not also apply to the higher, manganic, complex environments in which civilized peoples are living. There are tendencies in some to degrade men, especially to take from them that spark of originality and self-reliance which is the source of virility, of progress, of family life, and to reduce them to intellectual and moral peonage. This, in ways not necessary to mention here, lowers the birth rate, doubles the death rate, degrades the survivors and destroys the state. From primitive times until now there never came any solid advancement to a people that had not something ennobling for men and women to crave, or that sacrificed them to any god or fetish whatsoever.