Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism. If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess has never lasted long. The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,” practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be done.