Those who read history shake their heads in concern. They say that they are familiar with the symptoms, and can recognise the malady. Through such spluttering of energy and iridescence of dreams every great nation passed as it neared the end. Such scenes were witnessed, and just such cries were heard, in the marble porticoes of Greece when its glorious life began to sink. The same cries rang through the _fora_ of Imperial Rome, and were heard again in the _piasse_ of medieval Italy, when the long-drawn shadows fell on their exhausted citizens. Do not nations run the cycle of birth and lusty manhood and decay, like individuals? And is not this restlessness the familiar token that the heart is slowing down and the frame failing to control the worn and hypersensitive nerves? Do not the fevered dreams, the ceaseless irritation, the rebellion of parts that had served so well in silence, warn us that the dissolution, of which we have read so often, is setting in? Can we do other than knit the frame close in its old fabric, repress the impatient elements, and close our eyes resolutely to the disordered dreams? In this light many regard the agitation for a revision of woman's place in the social order. "The subordination of woman is invariably one of the prices of Empire," says Dr. Emil Reich, who has lately set out to correct our _chinoiserie d'idées_ with the breadth of his historical lore. The British or the German Empire grew to its height when--if we can forget Elizabeth--woman tended the cradle and the home, while man wrought its industries, shaped its policy, and bore its defence. With the same sharing of labour among their men and women all earlier empires had grown to power, and it was only in the years of decay that woman impatiently clamoured for an enlargement of her sphere. This agitation, they conclude, is the mere play of distempered nerves in an enfeebled system. It must be cured by a sermon on self-sacrifice, a return to virility, a stern refusal of the demand in the interest of the race. They who listen to it cannot have scanned the memorial pages in which history has written the fate of even greater empires than ours.