I hasten to add, however, in case I am mistaken here, that I am very far from wishing to set up any claim of superiority for savage woman over savage man. The momentous change was not, indeed, the result of any higher spiritual quality in the female, nor was it a religious movement, as is the beautiful dream of Bachofen. I do not think we can credit “a movement” as having taken place at all, rather the change arose gradually, inevitably, and quite simply. To postulate a conscious movement towards progress organised by women is surely absurd. Human nature does not start on any new line of conduct voluntarily, rather it is forced into it in connection with the conditions of life. Just as savage man was driven into unsocial conduct, so, as I shall try to show, savage woman was led by the same conditions acting in an opposite direction, into social conduct. My own thought was drawn first to this conclusion by noting the behaviour of a band of female turkeys with their young. It was a year ago. I was staying in a Sussex village, and near by my home was the meadow of a farm in which families of young turkeys were being reared. Here I often sat; and one day it chanced that I was reading _Social Origins and Primal Law_. I had reached the chapter on “Man in the Brutal Stage,” in which Mr. Atkinson gives the supposed facts of brute man, and the action of his jealousy in the family group. I was very much impressed; my reason told me that what the author stated so well was probably right. Such sexually jealous conduct on the part of savage man was likely to be true; it was much easier to accept this than the state of promiscuous intercourse, with its friendly communism in women, in which I had hitherto believed. I really was very much disturbed. For I was still unshaken in my belief in mother-right. How were the two theories to be reconciled? Often it is a small thing that points to the way for which one is seeking. All at once my little boy, who had been playing in the field, called out, “Oh, look at the Gobble-gobble,”--the name by which he called the male-turkey. The cock, his great tail spread, his throat swelling, was swaggering across the field, making an immense amount of noisy disturbance. A group of females and young birds, many of them almost full grown, were near to where we were sitting; they had been rooting about in the ground getting their food. Their fear at the approach of the strutting male was manifest. All the band gathered together, with the young in the centre, led and flanked by the mothers. As the male continued to advance upon them they retreated further and further, and finally took harbour in a barn. Here the swaggerer tried to follow them, but the rear females turned and faced him and drove him off.