e limits of this general stage,
the utility of their services seems commonly to be the dominant motive
to the acquisition of property in persons. Servants are valued for their
services. But the dominance of this motive is not due to a decline
in the absolute importance of the other two utilities possessed by
servants. It is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate
the utility of servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other
slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means
of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral
one, they are the usual form of investment for a profit. To such an
extent may female slavery give its character to the economic life under
the quasi-peaceable culture that the women even comes to serve as a unit
of value among peoples occupying this cultural stage--as for instance in
Homeric times. Where this is the case there need be little question but
that the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and that the
women are commonly slaves. The great, pervading human relation in such a
system is that of master and servant. The accepted evidence of wealth is
the possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves engaged
in attendance on their master's person and in producing goods for him.

A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service and
attendance on the master becomes the special office of a portion of the
servants, while those who are wholly employed in industrial occupations
proper are removed more and more from all immediate relation to the
person of their owner. At the same time those servants whose office
is personal service, including domestic duties, come gradually to be
exempted from productive industry carried on for gain.

This process of progressive exemption from the common run of industrial
employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the wife, or the
chief wife. After the community has advanced to settled habits of life,
wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes impracticable as a customary
source of supply. Where this cultural advance has been achieved, the
chief wife is ordinarily of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so
will hasten her exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which
the concept of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in this
place. For the purpose in hand it will b