The fact that women throughout their history have had to play the part of mothers, and therefore to stay very much at home, cannot be meant as the artificial factor in their evolution. We cannot therefore conceive of Mrs. Taylor’s having been so palpably foolish as to suppose that it was their motherhood that constituted this “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation.” Have there been “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation” in other respects—at least in the history of our race? Men of the J. S. Mill school say that you can trace women’s bondage throughout the ages, that you can see how they have been withheld both from places of responsibility and from opportunities for intellectual development ever since the dawn of history. But is this a fact? Is the evidence in favour of this view? Personally, I am convinced that the evidence is entirely against it. Within the limits naturally described by their destiny as mothers, we can, on the contrary, positively assert that, at least in England and France, nothing—no obstacle, no restriction and no harsh measure whatsoever have stood in the way of women’s development. Throughout the whole of its history, our people have been careful to place no barrier in the path of women’s advancement. It is rather the other way; everything has been done to enhance and to promote their importance. Speaking of the early Teutonic tribes, from which we partly sprang, Tacitus emphasizes the prominent rôle that was allowed to the women for generations. “They neither scorn to consult them, nor slight their answers,” said Tacitus. “They even believe that a certain sanctity and prescience characterize the female sex. We have seen Veleda ... long revered as a deity by many. Aurima, besides, and many more, were formerly treated with the same veneration, but not with slavish adulation, nor as if they were goddesses.”[156] Speaking of the neighbours of the Suiones, the Sitones, Tacitus says, they “differ in submitting to a female ruler; so far have they degenerated, not only from liberty, but even from slavery.”[157] Gibbon, after referring more particularly to those women in the early Teutonic tribes who were revered as goddesses, goes on to say: “The rest of the sex, without being adored as goddesses, were respected as the free and equal companions of soldiers; associated even by the marriage ceremony to a life of toil, of danger and of glory.”[158] “Even more marked than among the Teutonic and Frisian races,” says Dr. Browne, “was the recognition of women in the early Celtic races, whose blood—somewhat diluted—is in our veins.”[159] Two hundred years before the coming of Christ, in the league between Hannibal and the Celts, there was the following clause: “If the Celtae have complaints against the Carthaginians the Carthaginian commander in Spain shall judge it. But if the Carthaginians have anything to lay to the charge of the Celtae, it shall be brought before the Celtic women.”[160]