IT may seem strange that, if this has been the general course of development, the first civilised nation to which we turn does not bear the features that it would lead us to expect. Egypt, the first and most enduring of civilisations, has a proud page in the calendar of womanhood. In no other nation, until quite recent times, has woman enjoyed so much power and prestige. Indeed, the development of woman's position in Egypt is in some respects the reverse of what we shall find to be the general rule. There seems to have been no heritage of subjection from a barbaric past, but from the first we discover woman in a position of honour and influence. Through the long ages of Egypt's power she retains that position, and she finally loses it at the very stage of incipient decay at which the women of other civilisations are beginning to obtain it. We need not pause to point the moral for those who think that "the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of empire"; but we may recall our warning that there has been no uniformity in the separate national lines of human development. At the lowest levels of culture men and women are physically, mentally, and morally equal. There are, however, differences that contain the germ of the future divergence. The tie of the children makes the woman, like the female animal in her shorter motherhood, economically dependent on the male. As he grows in wisdom or astuteness, he will perceive and abuse it. Moreover, though sex functions as such lay little disability on the woman at that level of culture, the difference of their work has led to a difference in the nature of their powers. The man, accustomed to hunt and fight, works in spasms of energy, and can exert his stored force with greater effect on occasion. The woman works continuously and less violently. It may be added, too, that she has inherited an instinct of passivity in love: the male an instinct of active search and conquest--an instinct curiously embodied in the ovum and the sperm-cell. In all this we have a clear promise of the later development; and when the political structure evolves in the way I have indicated, and the control quite naturally falls to the men, the real wonder is that there were ever any approaches to a matriarchate at all. But many circumstances may influence the natural course of development; and it is sometimes forgotten that these circumstances may have passed away long before the race or tribe comes to our knowledge. Yet the effect on woman's position may remain, in people so tenacious of traditions. I have described many such circumstances, and need add here only the possibility of a distinctly moral or humane development on the point of the treatment of woman in some tribes. There are plenty of instances of the development among lowly tribes of one or other virtue (say veracity among the Khonds, or pacificness among the Esquimaux) above the European level.