The usual objection, when this story of the Renaissance and the feministic movement connected with it is told, if the narrator would urge that here was an earlier period of feminine education than ours, is that, after all, the education of this period was confined to only a few of the nobility. This is not true, and there are many reasons why it is not true. First, the upper classes are always imitated by the others, and if there was a fashion for education we can be sure that it spread. We have not the records of many educated women, but those that we have all make it clear that education was not confined to a few, and that those of the middle classes who wanted it could readily secure it. There were probably as many women to the population of Europe at that time enjoying the higher education as there are proportionately in America at the present time. Europe had but a small population altogether in the fifteenth century. There {211} were probably less than 4,000,000 of people in England at the end, even, of the sixteenth century. In Elizabeth's time when the census was taken, because of the Spanish Armada, these were the figures. There were not many more people in all Europe then than there are now in England. If out of these few, comparatively, we can pick out the group of distinguished women whom I have just spoken of, then there must have been a great many sharing in the privileges of the higher education. [Footnote 16] [Footnote 16: What an interesting reflection on the notion of supposed progress is the fact pointed out by Ambassador Bryce in his address on Progress (_Atlantic_ July, 1907), that while out of 40,000,000 of people there were so many genius men and women accomplishing work that the world will never willingly let die, we with a population ten times as great cannot show anything like as many. Most of the great names that are most familiar to the modern mind come in a single century,--the sixteenth. At the present time the western civilization then represented by 40,000,000 has near to 500,000,000 of people. We make no pretension at all, however, to the claim that we have more great men than they had. We should have ten times as many, but on the contrary we are quite willing to concede that we have very few compared to their number and almost none, if indeed there are any, who measure up to the high standards of achievement of that time more than four centuries ago. It is thoughts of this kind that show one how much we must correct the ordinarily accepted notions with regard to progress and inevitable development, and each generation improving on its predecessors and the like, that are so commonly diffused but that represent no reality in history at all.]