of human affection in the home, and also through their early understood economic value, they have made their third great contribution to social culture.

We are but just beginning, however, to recognize the full value of woman's early service to "the common weal." "It is all work, and forgotten work, this many-peopled world," says Carlyle. How much more deeply buried in oblivion has been the labor of women than even the humblest toil of man, until this later day! Poets and painters have sometimes pictured the value and the pathos of the peasant and the artisan after man became a farmer and craftsman. Not until the new sciences were born did the more fundamental labor of women emerge to view. In that greatest poem of the vocations yet written, the author of Ecclesiasticus, although paying exclusive homage to the sage and the ruler, as was the wont of ancient writers, still does such justice to the manual laborers as to declare:

"These are they that maintain the fabric of the world,

And without them is no city builded."

It is this" fabric of the world," rather than any pattern wrought upon it by the genius of great persons, in which the new psychology and the new sociology are chiefly concerned. It is the contribution to social progress by the humbler mass of men and women, this which has been so scornfully ignored by the older writers of history, which to-day yields to social science the truest answers to the riddles of human growth. In this "fabric of the world" of common life woman is the warp-the threads of her being "stretched on the loom of time" from out the mystery of the past on toward the mystery of the future without a break. Man is the woof-passed from pattern to pattern by the changing shuttles that weave the stuff of human progress and oft embroidering upon the endless web the splendid characters that inspire reverence and admiration. In the massive contribution of womanhood to the social fabric the part played by the primitive working-woman appears to-day, for the first time, in its true proportions. Rightly typified by the Eskimo woman who rises in the dim morning twilight of an arctic winter to set her rude hut in order and stir the fire for others' comfort, the ancient mothers of the race started the first steps of human en

deavor on the paths of social order in the gray dawn of human existence. The primitive working-woman gave the "curtainraiser" of prehistoric experience that prepared human consciousness for the epic of history. In the dream-like pantomime of her opening prologue, in which man passes back and forth in fleeting and inconsequent action, and in which not individual women but collective womanhood holds the stage, her cloud of witnesses show forth her mighty gifts. Silently she sets in place the four cornerstones of the house of life:

The treasury of pre-human motherhood to dower humanity.

The initiation of the race into useful and peaceful labor. The softening of the rigors of slavery by a unique appeal to pity and affection.

The cultivation from within the home, even in captivity, of those coöperative impulses which make for social welfare.

In and through these gifts the primitive woman appears to-day more modern to the instructed sympathy than many of the "speaking characters" that follow her in the drama of historic times. The warring heroes who must die on the battlefield or be disgraced, the unsocial rulers who despoiled the people to make a bestial holiday for courts, the aberrant geniuses who overlaid simple human duty with vagaries of theology that instituted bloody inquisitions, even the philosophers who captured the idealism of the race for unworkable and often dangerous theories of human conduct-these all are less in harmony with our present and oncoming industrial and social order than is the womanhood that led the way toward social solidarity.

As the searchlight of science is turned from one dark corner to another of the stage whereon the kindergarten of the race held session, these simple everyday workers of the mother-sex become our familiar and well-beloved teachers. They are more and more perceived to be the real "prophetesses," symbolized by some religions as deities-those who in half-conscious response to the "vast soul that o'er them planned," in the dark and terror and suffering of the earliest time, "builded better than they knew" the foundations of the Temple of Humanity.

And these shall deem thee humbly bred:
They shall not hear, they shall not see
The kings among the lordly dead

Who walk and talk with thee.

A tattered cloak may be thy dole,
And thine the roof that Jesus had:
The broidered garment of the soul
Shall keep thee purple-clad!

The blood of men hath dyed its brede,
And it was wrought by holy seers
With sombre dream and golden deed,
And pearled with women's tears.

With Eld thy chain of days is one:
The seas are still Homeric seas;
Thy skies shall glow with Pindar's sun,
The stars of Socrates!

Unaged, the ancient tide shall surge,
The old spring burn along the bough:

For thee the old and new converge

In one eternal Now!

I give thy feet the hopeful sod,

Thy mouth, the priceless boon of breath;

The glory of the search for God

Be thine in life and death!

Unto thy flesh, the restful grave,

Thy soul, the gift of being free: The robe, the torch my fathers gave, Thy father gives to thee!

DEATH'S HOLIDAY

WILLIAM HERVEY WOODS

H'

E came upon the coasts of God at dawn's young smiling, Across the morn and down the mists, to where they waiting lay,

The children, lent him at his prayer; and with strange wiling He laughed to them and sang to them, and led them far away:

Led them to Heaven's pleasaunce-place adown Life's river-
The river now was in the cliffs, and placid as the sky-
To scenes so fair that waters there and winds paused ever,
And Time, with many a wistful look, would alway dally by.

And thither came my Lord of Death, a mad crew leading

Of dimpled rascals pink and sleek, with limpid, searching eyes, No whit afraid: the shyest one, with two hands pleading, Anon in one great arm is throned, and straight the world defies.

They never knew a gentler guide. A brown wren nesting
Forsook her eggs to follow him; a butterfly's gay plumes
His touch unruffled leaves; and violets that questing
Young winds despoil, his palms caress, but leave the ripe
perfumes.

One care alone he cannot hide, one warm wish carries—
That not a childish heart may know a doubting or a fear,
And kindly tongue and touch so winningly he marries
That still the happiest elf is he who oftenest presses near.