mon 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. "The Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, Chap. 38.

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 endeavor on the paths of social order in the gray dawn of human existence. The primitive working-woman gave the "curtain-raiser" 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 ap-. pears 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.

II

THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN LADY

IT is recorded that Alfred of England, the Good and the Great, was illiterate until the age of twelve years, and that he was then incited to learning by his charming young stepmother, Judith, the granddaughter of Charlemagne and also of that earlier Judith who was in her day "the most accomplished woman in France." The pretty story runs, that the tactful stepmother showed the sons of Æthelwolf, of whom Alfred was the youngest, a book of Saxon poetry, beautifully illuminated, and promised it as a gift to the one who should earliest learn to read it. Whereupon Alfred spoke first and asked: "Will you really give that book to him who can first understand and repeat it?" At this, we are told, his stepmother "smiled with satisfaction" and confirmed the promise; upon which the boy took the book from her hand and "went to his master to read it and in due time brought it back to her and recited it."

If, as Professor Cook1 suggests in the preface to his translation of the epic fragment-Judith—the

1 Albert Stanborough Cook, Judith; An Old English Epic Fragment.

Saxon poem promised as a reward for learning to read, was this same heroic song, which in subtle compliment by its author bore her name, we have in this incident of Alfred's stepmother a complete illustration of the social value of the lady at her best. Inspiring works of genius by her loveliness and sympathetic appreciation, lifting and sweetening social intercourse by the higher companionships of literature and art, and handing on the fruits of learning and the gifts of imagination to ardent youth, the lady of this type is the fair link between the intellectual achievements of the race and the social life of cultured leisure.

The lady is but the woman of the favored social class; she is, however, more than a member of a special class; she is the earliest of womanhood to attain individuality. She is the first person singular of the female sex. She begins her career as a belle of some savage tribe; some maiden of unusual beauty and attractiveness, according to the prevailing standards of her time and place, who by the partiality of her elders or by her own daring appeal succeeds in getting herself made a “favorite," and in securing the service of less desired women to ease for her the burden of feminine labor. She is always, at first, young; generally very young. The "old lady" cannot be found in primitive society, save as she is transformed into a priestess or a public counsellor in those early forms of social organization which preserve most ancient ideals of sacredness and power along the female line of descent. She may be, as in Chinese society, the acknowledged head of domestic concerns, custodian of never-disputed