Thus Rome had completely removed the sex-disability of its women while it was still in the fulness of power, and as a direct consequence of its later moral culture. That this emancipation did not include the granting of political power can cause no surprise to those who know the history of Rome. Since the fall of the Republic the men themselves had no political power, and, therefore, the women had no sex-disability on this side to agitate against. It is true that the imperial purple was held exclusively by men, and the great administrative offices were open to men alone. Against this arrangement women may have protested; but we should hardly expect such a protest until a more advanced stage of evolution; and, in point of fact, the more ambitious women had a great deal of indirect power. Even before the fall of the Republic we find notices of what we should now call "women's clubs" (_senatus matronarum_), and when power was concentrated in an hereditary monarchy the royal women had immense influence over it. Women agitated in municipal elections, as we saw, controlled small towns in the character of municipal patrons, and influenced the choice of quæstors, prætors, and tribunes. With this large measure of influence for the wealthier women, and with the general admission of her equal mental capacity to men, it was natural for woman to cease from agitation; the mass of the women, who had not these opportunities, were in no worse plight, politically, than their husbands. Until government by popular representatives was once more adopted or demanded we can hardly look for a further agitation. But the Roman Empire was now beginning to decay, and the cause of woman was lost in the general catastrophe. In speaking of decay as setting in immediately after the completion of woman's emancipation I need hardly recall my protest against connecting the two. The decay of the Roman Empire was due to causes that are plainly set forth by modern historians like Boissier and Schultze, and that have nothing whatever to do with the emancipation of woman. No serious historian ever dreamed of such a notion until the modern feminist movement arose. In point of fact, the emancipation of woman was completed long before Rome passed the height of its power. What the Stoics did was rather to find a healthy moral basis for the liberty that had already been won. I cannot go into the complex causes of the decay of the Empire in Europe, but will only say that it is traced to political, economic, and physical degeneration, with which the position of woman is absolutely unconnected. To the very end Roman women retained their culture, character, and influence; and the last glimpses we get (in Symmachus and Macrobius) of Pagan Rome, before the Goths invade it, leave with us a memory of a sober, cultivated, humane society, unconscious that the wheels of fate are making so appalling a revolution.