ch more severe, she was always obliged to be
able to prove, _cloths in hand_, that she was a virgin at the moment
of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned."

The same state of affairs or worse existed in India and in Persia,
although in Persia there seems to have been an attempt to enjoin the
same fidelity upon the husband as upon the wife, according to the
Zend-Avesta; the only severe restriction to marriage being that
neither should marry an infidel. In India, where there has been for
centuries an alleged monogamy (except among the privileged classes,
where concubinage held sway), the ethical condition of the women has
been, and still is, deplorable.

In ancient Greece and Rome the position of the woman was most
inferior. She was generally purchased, or given for service. Her
husband's word was law, and mothers were compelled to obey their male
children as uncomplainingly as though they were slaves. The wife and
mother was not permitted to attend festivities and neither was she
allowed the selection of her friends, her husband deciding this choice
for her.

This, of course, applied to the respectable, or so-called virtuous
woman, which constituted the average. Then, as now, two classes of
women were to some extent exempt from this rigid custom. One class
was formed by those women whose wealth conferred upon them a degree of
power, because the possessors of great wealth have always been a law
unto themselves. The other class was formed by the women who practiced
prostitution, and who, by reason of their mode of life, met men on
terms of at least temporary social equality.

Thus it is evident that the path of the virtuous woman without the
independence that accompanies the possession of her own money, was in
ancient days much more thorny than that of the concubine or the
prostitute; and it is because of this fact that parental love, the
most powerful of all levers employed by the Cosmic Law to lift love
out of degradation, instituted the custom of the "dowry," and although
this, too, has at various times become a source of degradation,
inspiring impoverished aristocrats to loveless marriages with
so-called inferiors, yet it has after all been a factor in the
evolution of women and the preservation of the races. It has served
two purposes. It has made women, in theory at least, more independent;
and it has resulted in an admixture of blood which has saved the
aristocratic class from extinction through de