Yet the realm which the women-chiefs and priestesses of Formosa govern is the reverse of anarchic. Laws there are as the laws of the Medes and Persians; or as those are supposed to have been. Every act of daily life, personal as well as communal, is regulated by law, and any infringement of this law is met with dire penalty. This--incidentally--holds true with all primitive peoples, patriarchal as well as matriarchal. Those who fancy that a “return to nature”--meaning to primitive conditions--would give licence either for lawlessness or for the indulgence without restraint in individual preference, social or political, reckon without knowledge of conditions actually existing in primitive society. One shudders to think what would have been Rousseau’s fate had he really “returned to nature”--i.e. lived among the _Naturvölker_--and broken tabu of marriage or parenthood. For those who hold in contempt established convention, or life regulated by law, primitive society is not the place. But to return to the question of gynarchic rule: All the women of this particular island--or of that particular part of it still under aboriginal control and hence matriarchal--are not Sapphos or Katherines--are not even the primitive prototypes of these illustrious ladies--any more than they are simpering _Doras_,[106] neurotics, or nymphomaniacs. As George Eliot made one of her characters, in speaking of her own sex, remark, “The Lord made ‘em fools to match the men,” so one is inclined to ask, after having seen the practical working of a gynocracy, if women were made also good and bad--in the comprehensive inclusiveness of those words--wise and foolish, to match the so-called sterner sex; the sex which seems, however, in reality neither sterner nor more bloodthirsty than the so-called gentler one; any more than it seems a greater lover of abstract justice, which, according to one English writer, “no woman understands.”[107] Which train of wondering brings us back to the original wonder with which this chapter started: If our European forefathers had ever, in the dim “once-upon-a-time” of long ago, the same standards of right and wrong as the present-day _seban_ of Formosa; if they, too, were once matri-potestal--what would have been the line of evolution that Europe would have followed had this state of affairs continued, only gradually evolving, through letters and arts, from savagery to so-called civilization? Should we have been better governed or worse?