Yet in these things there is to be found no general accusation of women. That cruelty should be carried by them to its extreme, that they should love it for its own sake, is but the development of extremism, and is isolated in examples, at least by periods. The Russian countess was not cruel because she was a woman, but, being cruel of nature, she was the more so because of her sex. The ladies of imperial Rome did not love the sight of flowing blood because they were women, but, being women, they carried their acquired taste to bounds unknown to the less impulsive and less ardent nature of men. Yet there comes a question. Is this lust for blood, this love of cruelty; latent in every woman and but restrained, by the gentler teachings and promptings of her more developed nature in its highest presentation? So some psychists would have us believe; but they have only slight ground for their sweeping assertion. That civilisation is but restrained savagery may perhaps be conceded; but if the restraint has grown to be the ever-dominant impulse, then has the savage been slain. It is not, as some teach, that such isolated idiosyncrasies as we have considered are glimpses of the tiger that sleeps in every human heart and sometimes breaks its chain and runs riot. As a rule, these things are matters of atmosphere. Setting aside such pure isolations as that of the Russian countess, it will almost invariably be found that the display of feminine cruelty, or of any vice, is of a time and place. There has never been a universal rule of feminine depravity in any age. Babylon, Carthage, Greece, Rome, and all the olden civilisations have had their periods when female virtue was a matter of laughter, when women outvied men in their moral degradation, when evil seemed triumphant everywhere; but there always remained a few to "redeem the time," and salvation always came from those few. Moreover, the sphere of immorality and crime was always limited. The Roman world, when it was the world indeed, might be given up to vice and sin, displayed in their most atrocious forms by the women of the Empire; but there still stood the North, calm, virtuous, patient, awaiting its opportunity to "root out the evil thing" and to give the world once more a standard of purity and righteousness. The leaven of Christianity was effective in its work upon the moral degradation of the Roman Empire; but it was not until the scourge of the Northmen was sent to the aid of the principle that success was fully won. So the North was not of the same day with Rome in civilised vice, and the reign of evil in the Latin Empire was but the effect of conditions, not the instincts of humanity. Rome was taught evil by long and steadfast evolution; it did not spring up in a day with its deadly blight, but was the result of progressive causation.