Representative Freewomen, therefore, have always been in a small minority. The dominance of a _temporary majority_ sends a minority into the Opposition; in which exile it lays plans for future action, when in the see-saw of political change its turn comes to rise again. The majority has always to consider the minority in its calculations and actions. But a _permanent majority_, consciously or unconsciously, labours to oust a _permanent minority_ from recognised and recognisable existence even as an Opposition. By _always_ being able to overbear opinion, it makes the expression of opinion futile. Either it is concordant and unnecessary, or discordant and inoperative. The expression of either becomes a waste of time, and is soon denied. And thus women have been ousted by degrees from the building up of the superstructure of the English Constitution, in whose foundations they had been considered. The privilege of British Freewomen remained a recognised quantity for ages. Though that quantity became “small by degrees and beautifully less,” it was not finally annihilated till the heart of the nineteenth century. The process of diminution was hastened in periods of spasmodic activity through association of principles that should have worked in the opposite direction, had the principles been understood and applied in their purity. No doctrine is more antagonistic to the spirit and teaching of Christ than that of the subjection of women, and yet, though the change from the Druidic religion to the worship of Odin affected them but slightly, the changes within the Christian Creed mark epochs in their gradual enthralment; as, for instance, the sixteenth century Reformation and the seventeenth century Revival On the Suppression of the Monasteries, Abbots and Abbesses were alike extinguished. But the power and privilege of the Abbot in the House of Peers as in the Church, survived in the Bishop. The extinction of the Abbess, without successor either in Church or State, took away finally the right of one class of representative women to sit in the Upper House. The suppression of the Social and Religious Guilds founded and supported by women in common with men, gave a seeming reason for later exclusion of Freewomen from trade guilds. The loudest Puritan cry of the seventeenth century was, it is true, “No Bishop;” but the practical work Puritanism was really allowed to do in politics was to make the representation of women in the Lower House theoretically impossible.