Such conditions, as we proved in our own experience of slavery, benumb spiritual perception and make clear vision impossible; and it is plain that if the mass of workers had neither political nor social place, woman, the slave of the slave, had even less.  Her wage had never been fixed.  That she had right to one had entered no imagination.  To the end of Greek civilization a wage remained the right of free labor only.  The slave, save by special permit of the master, had right only to bare subsistence; and though men and women toiled side by side, in mine or field or quarry, there was, even with the abolition of slavery, small betterment of the condition of women.  The degradation of labor was so complete, even for the freeman, that the most pronounced aversion to taking a wage ruled among the entire educated class.  Plato abhorred a sophist who would work for wages.  A gift was legitimate, but pay ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all labor.  The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated.  A curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and retrogression, it lingers still.

The ancients were, in the nature of things, all fighters.  Even when slavery for both the Aryan and Semitic races ended, two orders still faced each other:  aristocracy on the one side, claiming the fruits of labor; the freeman on the other, rebelling against injustice, and forming secret unions for his own protection,—­the beginning of the co-operative principle in action.

Thus much for the Greek.  Turn now to the second great civilization, the Roman.  During the first centuries after the founding of Rome the Roman woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of the Grecian.  With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more social but still no legal freedom was accorded.  The elder Cato complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but in spite of this remonstrance, a movement for the better had begun.  Under the Empire, woman acquired the right of inheritance, but she herself remained a minor, and could dispose of nothing without the consent of her guardian.  Sir Henry Maine[3] calls attention to the institution known to the oldest Roman law as the “Perpetual Tutelage of Women,” under which a female, though relieved from her parent’s authority by his decease, continues subject through life.  Various schemes were devised to enable her to defeat ancient rules; and by their theory of “Natural Law,” the jurisconsults had evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity.