the Assyrian Istar, the Egyptian Hathor, all celebrate the power of romantic love that binds the sexes together and slays antagonism between them. The Demeter and Athena myths all lead to a reverence for womanhood as embodied in the fruitfulness of the earth and in the peaceful order of social life. The great Egyptian goddess Neith, the Weaver, whose hieroglyph is the shuttle, passes down even to our own civilization the recognition of woman's value in the industrial arts. The Chinese female Buddha, Kwanyin, the Mother-goddess, may be responsible even at this late day for some of the new freedom and power of her sex in that suddenly awakened land. Everywhere in mythology, and in the story of human life before formal history began, we find traces of a reverent appreciation of the woman-spirit as symbolized by goddesses. The classic Fates make women preside over destiny; the spinner of the thread of life, the mysterious power that determines its length, and the dread agent of its ending by death, are all portrayed as the genius of womanhood. The energy of women and their constant usefulness were fitly symbolized by the activity of the women-worshippers who in the Temple of Athena spent nine months of incessant labor in weaving the peplos which was carried in the sacred procession and was the annual gift to the goddess.

In all these hints of the past the woman-spirit is honored; and although "hags" and evil-working old women are not wanting, the general tendency of primitive and of classic faith and worship was respectful if not reverent toward elderly women. The ancients

believed in magic powers intensely and universally, but not that such magic powers always or usually denoted evil spirits. Christianity, when it entered upon its mania of asceticism, turned all the spirits of the air, even to the lovely fairies and the helpful "Brownies," into emissaries of Satan, the arch-king of evil. Minerva, the air goddess, symbol of light and wisdom, became transformed with all her kin into witch-creatures who spent unholy Sabbaths in secret converse with the Devil and came back riding their broomsticks through the air to seduce and ruin mankind. In this connection it must be remembered that the natural tendencies of the woman-nature are wholly against asceticism. The nearness of the mother to child-life forbids the average woman from really believing, whatever the theologians may make her say in church, that this world was meant to be a "living tomb" or a "chamber of death and misery." Children bring with them an ever-renewed and ever-renewing sense of the gladness of life, and not all the morbid priests or abnormal theologies have ever been able to persuade women in general that the laugh of a child is a lie! Nature, indeed, having in view the perpetual adjustment of adult life to the child's demand for freedom and for joy, has, as Havelock Ellis finely says, "done her best to make women healthy and glad." The false view of life and duty which asceticism held and realized made this natural union of the woman-nature with the child's charm and gladness seem a wicked thing. Nothing but such a hatred of womanhood and such a fear of her as the embodiment of the natural attractions

upon which the home is builded could have made possible the tragedy of the witchcraft delusions and its untold miseries.

The second reason why, as a rule, women were the special victims of this witchcraft horror is the fact that women, while suffering less than men from serious and fatal disorders of the brain and nervous system, are peculiarly susceptible to slighter disturbances which produce irritability, abnormal excitements and diseased manifestations of energy. This tendency is being corrected in rapidly increasing ratio by the better physical training of girls, by the wider intellectual interests of women, and, above all, by the new opportunities for congenial work in later life which are now the common privilege of the sex. In the earlier days, however, when witches paid the penalty of superstition through the tyranny of false doctrine, the lot of the majority of women was extremely hard. There was no limit to woman's child-bearing except nature's failure to add another to her cares; there was no limit to her household drudgery except nature's failure to give her strength to rise again to her daily task. She was socially denied, except in the case of a few "ladies" at the top of life's opportunity, any share in the intellectual stimulus that is so therapeutic, and she had no ability to secure those pleasant diversions that balance work for the benefit of the nervous energy. After thirty to fifty years of overwork, under most adverse conditions for the preservation of health and strength, the wife and mother could be left to an idleness most harmful; or else be pressed still to a form of hard

labor least satisfying to personal desires. It is not strange that the prevalence of nerve troubles of various sorts among old women thus mistreated has made them pass down in art and history as "uncanny," and also made them, during the nightmare of the witchcraft delusion, seem the natural prey of Satan as he sought "whom he might devour." Men and women alike age prematurely under the hard conditions of primitive life; but old women have been thought to be either wholly useless or else made to work in narrow lines of activity, while old men have been more often favored as still "good for counsel." This hard lot of the old woman was modified in the patriarchal family by making the oldest mother a sort of subdespot, a deputy ruler over all the younger women and girls. This has helped her in dignity of position, and in stimulus to effort, to conserve her powers in old age; but, lacking education and true moral discipline, the mother-rulers of more primitive forms of family life have often perpetuated the most archaic and socially harmful usages of domestic order. This personal alleviation has therefore not been a social gain.

Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age. The absurd mistake of supposing that a woman's usefulness was ended when her last baby grew out of need for her personal ministrations was natural so long as women were held subject and inferior, and denied all mental training;

but its lingering remnants in the modern mind are grotesque. Only recently a political orator, wishing to characterize his opponents in the most contemptuous of terms, said "they were a set of old women." This phrase as an expression of utter futility and weakness has come down from times in which women's strength of mind and body was so shockingly exploited that in old age they were very often diseased and abnormal, helpless, and a family burden. From this fact, due not to natural limitations, but to social conditions resulting from the misuse of womanhood from childhood to old age, has arisen the false conception of women as semi-invalids in the earlier part of life and incapable of any efficient labor of mind or body in the later years. Nothing could be further from the truth as now revealed and demonstrated by scientific study. In point of fact we now know that so far from men being the favorites of nature as to health, strength and longevity, and women (like stepchildren) a denied class, the contrary is more nearly true.3 It is women, as mothers and potential mothers of the race, whose life and health the cosmic forces most concern themselves with, and longest sustain in activity. Inquiries into facts are now taking the place of theories, whether of poets or theologians, and facts provel women capable of more than holding their own in the balance of sex-relationship and in the work of the world. Facts show that more male than female children are still-born, and that more male infants succumb to disease before the third year. Facts show that more

See Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Chap. XVII.