Like other subjects, woman required of her master two things--_panem et circenses_,--bread and circuses. When the industrial changes brought about by the introduction of machinery put an end to the old patriarchal system of home manufactures, man found it less easy to provide for his woman-kind--more especially his collateral woman-kind--and without any very manifest reluctance he turned her out into the world to shift for herself. Here was a shock to her faith and loyalty! The all-powerful male admitted his inability to provide for these sisters, cousins, aunts, and more distant kin who had looked up to him as the fount of existence, and had toiled and fed contentedly under his roof, yielding to him obedience as the natural provider and master. Woman went away sorrowful and--very thoughtful. This alone was not enough to quite alienate her faith, however. Woman was still, as always, a creature of imagination--dazzled by colour, by pomp, by fanfaronade. She was still a creature of romance, adoring the picturesque, yielding her heart to courage, to power, to daring and endurance--all the sterner virtues which she herself lacked. The man of the past was often brutal to her--overbearing always, cruel at times, but he fascinated her by his masterfulness and his splendour. She might go fine, but he would still be the finer bird. When she thought of him she was hypnotized by a memory of gold, a waving of purple, a glitter of steel, a flutter of scarlet. He knew that this admiration of hers for beauty and colour was as old as the world. From primordial periods the male has recognized this need of the female. The fish in the sea, the reptile in the dust, the bird in the forest, the wild beast in the jungle are all aware of their mates' passion for gleaming scales, for glowing plumes, for dappled hides and orgulous crests of hair. They know, they have always known, that no king can reign without splendour. Only man, bent solely upon his own comfort and, it would seem, upon the abandonment of his power, deliberately sets himself against this need of the female, which has become imbedded in her nature through every successive step up in the scale of evolution. He alone fatuously prides himself on the dark, bifurcated simplicity of his attire, intended only for warmth and ease and constructed with a calculated avoidance of adornment. To avoid criticism he has set up a theory that a superior sort of masculinity is demonstrated by the dark tint and unbeautiful shape of garments (as if the fighting man, the soldier--who is nothing if not masculine--were not always a colourful creature); and chooses to ignore or resent woman's weakness for this same gold-laced combatant, and for the silken, picturesque actor.