How little there is in any question of evolution having brought new influence or higher place to woman may be very well realized from this position of women among the old Greeks. Gladstone has called attention to it very forcibly in his "Essay on the Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order," when he says, "Outside {241} the pale of Christianity, it would be difficult to find a parallel in point of elevation to the Greek women of the heroic age." He has taken the place of woman as representing the criterion by which the civilization and the culture of a people at any time may be judged, though he does not at all think that one finds a constant upward tendency in history in this regard. He says: "For when we are seeking to ascertain the measure of that conception which any given race has formed of our nature, there is, perhaps, no single test so effective, as the position which it assigns to woman. For as the law of force is the law of brute creation, so in proportion as he is under the yoke of that law does man approximate to the brute. And in proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of being and claiming relationship with Deity. But the emancipation and due ascendency of woman are not a mere fact, they are the emphatic assertion of a principle, and that principle is the dethronement of the law of force and the enthronement of other and higher laws in its place and its despite."