Adultery on the part of the wife involved a legal divorce and the restitution of the dowry, but rather than come to this painful extremity, the husbands preferred to close their eyes to the foibles of their wives; at Rome and at Athens the law had to strike at them in order to recall them to their marital dignity; in China a certain number of bamboo strokes were applied to the soles of their feet. The penalties not being sufficient to encourage the husbands to repudiate their adulterous wives, the law, in order to prop up masculine virtue, permitted those who denounced the infidelity of the wife to retain a part of the dowry; there were then men who married only in prospect of the adultery of the wife. The Roman women evaded the law by having themselves enrolled in the censor's book on the list of prostitutes, to whom it did not apply. The number of matrons inscribed became so considerable that the Senate, under Tiberius passed a decree forbidding "women who had a patrician for a grandfather, husband or father to traffic in their bodies." (Tacitus, Annals II., 85.) Adultery on the part of the wife in the patrician society of antiquity, as well as in the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century, had become so general that it had so to speak entered into the social customs. It was looked upon lightly as a corrective and accompaniment of marriage. [35] The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that the religion of Saint Simon had come "to put an end to that shameful traffic, that legal prostitution, which under the name of marriage often blesses the monstrous union of self-surrender and egoism, of light and of ignorance, of youth and decrepitude." [36] The French companies make no differences between the sexes because they pay very small annuities. La Génerale, the most important one in France, gives for $1,000 at the age of 50 years an annuity of $64.20; at 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at 80 years $134.70. Thus it realizes immense profits: its shares which in 1819 were worth 750 francs each were quoted last January at 31,300 francs. [37] E. Legou. "Some Considerations on the Development of the Foetus." Paris. 1903. The weights and measurements of M. Legou were made for official use. [38] The latest observations upon ants and bees tend to prove that the fertilized eggs would give birth to females and to workers; and the nonfertilized to males, which consequently would be born from eggs that are less complex. [39] A. W. Howit, who observed among the Australians a species of sexual totemism, says that it often happens that the women and men of one and the same clan fight, when the animal that serves as the totem for one sex is killed by the other sex. THE SOCIALIST IDEAL