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 decadence. As might well be expected in those instances where women did enjoy a degree of liberty that was due to financial and social advantages, they took a mean delight in ruling it over their male relatives, and, as we may note in our own time, men who yielded to the seduction of wealth, and married women to whom they were forced to accord the freedom and the deference which wealth confers, complained bitterly of their lot; as witness the following complaint of a Roman husband: "I have married a witch with a dowry; I took her to have her fields and houses, and that, O Apollo, is the worst of evils." One dominant idea controlled the status of marriage in early Greece and Rome--an idea in full accord with the materialistic phase of their civilization; this was the idea of procreation; an idea that logically was inevitable, since continuous warfare resulted in a population in which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished. Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase "between the devil and the deep sea." Regarding the "ideal of marital fidelity," Plutarch is authority for the story that Cato loaned his wife to his friend Hortensius and took her back on the death of the latter, plus a rich inheritance from the transaction. However, should Martha have yielded herself voluntarily to Hortensius, from motives of affection, the chances are that she would have met death at the hands of her "justly outraged" spouse. In Europe, similar conditions prevailed, and although monogamy was the rule, concubinage and prostitution in all its forms existed. The wife was subject to the husband in every wish and whim, and after him to the eldest son. This is true today in Germany and among the Saxons in a degree whose modifications do not accord with other advances in our social ethics. It is a mistake to claim that religious systems have had any direct influence in the emancipation of women during the nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization among the white races.