At the same time
those servants whose office is personal service, including
domestic duties, come gradually to be exempted from productive
industry carried on for gain.
This process of progressive exemption from the common run of
industrial employment will commonly begin with the exemption of
the wife, or the chief wife. After the community has advanced to
settled habits of life, wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes
impracticable as a customary source of supply. Where this
cultural advance has been achieved, the chief wife is ordinarily
of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so will hasten her
exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which the concept
of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in
this place. For the purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say
that gentle blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted
contact with accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative. The
women with these antecedents is preferred in marriage, both for
the sake of a resulting alliance with her powerful relatives and
because a superior worth is felt to inhere in blood which has
been associated with many goods and great power.
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