And comparing some modern developments with these records of Ruin, one can but be struck by notable resemblances between these latter and the present-day trend of all our greater civilisations. In the decline of Rome, the Roman women went to two extremes. A tendency that shows increasingly among our modern womanhood. They separated into two main orders. "Blue-stocking" and "Rake," they were then designated. "Mannish" and "Womanish," or "Feminist" and "Ultra-Feminine," better characterise their latter-day presentments. In America, these two orders of women are known as the "College" and the "Society" types, respectively. The "College" type makes a cult of masculinity of body and of brain. The "Society" type makes a cult of feminine graces and social accomplishments. In the poorer, as in the superior classes of all nations, similar extremes are found. One order is virile and hard-working; and for the most part plain and moral. The other is womanish and pretty; and for the most part frail. With us--as with those earlier peoples--the demand for liberty and unrestricted economic opportunities for women is occasioning contempt for and evasion of the functions of wife and of mother, emancipation from the home, increasing absorption in public affairs, fever for pleasure, lapse of womanly traditions and morale. All of which developments passed rapidly, in those others, into general laxity, licence and corruption; culminating finally in total ruin. With them, the claims of Home and of The Family became, as they are becoming more and more with us, secondary merely and subsidiary to other pursuits; to personal ambitions, public careers, to pleasures, excitements, crazes for notoriety. Woman's inherent erraticism--defect of her intrinsic spontaneity, her bent for novelty and strong sensation--degenerated, under the licence accorded her in ancient Rome, into the appalling orgies of The Bacchanalia; which were instituted by the sex. Women attended the displays of gladiators. They watched the wild beasts tear their victims. They themselves dressed as gladiators, and held mimic combats. By cult of muscle, they grew taller than the men. Sallust writes thus of a notorious Roman matron: "Sempronia had committed many crimes of a boldness _worthy of a man_. Blest alike in family and beauty, in husband and children, she was well-read in Greek and Roman literature; could sing, play and dance more gracefully than any honest woman need; had many of the other accomplishments of a riotous life. She cared for nothing less than for decency and modesty." Fifty years later, Seneca takes up the story of a rapid decadence: "The ladies do not reckon the years by the number of the Consuls, but by the number of their husbands." Much the same licence, extravagance and viciousness of the sex characterised the greater number of those other old-world wreckages.