Thus, as I said in the beginning, the woman-movement of that older empire broke up only because its civilisation was broken. Rome had carried the cause of woman's emancipation to a great height, and, had a fresh civilisation succeeded at once to the heritage, as Greece succeeded Rome, the story would have been completed long ago. Unhappily, Roman civilisation was replaced by a fresh barbarism, and Europe fell with terrible rapidity into the swamp of the Middle Ages. Women sank back all over Europe into a state of such subordination that fourteen hundred years after the fall of Rome there was not a civilisation in the world that would grant her the least semblance of that legal and mental equality with man which she had laboriously won nearly 2,000 years before. The cause of woman passed into an abyss, from which it is only now emerging afresh. How that came about, and why it lingered so long in the abyss, we have now to see. CHAPTER VI. THE DARK AGE OF FEMINISM THE millennium that lies between the year 500 and the year 1500 of the Christian Era is known to all historians as the Middle Age, and to very many as the Dark Age. Into the general correctness or incorrectness of the latter title I need not inquire. In the story of the evolution of woman that millennium must assuredly figure as the Dark Age. All the prestige that woman had enjoyed in Egypt, all the admissions she had wrung from the philosophers of Greece, all the high ambitions she had realised in Rome, were sunk deep in Lethe, and woman was again in a position of great subordination all over the world. Among the nations that were slowly rising to civilisation in the remote and unknown west, among the nations that had already reached civilisation in the east and south of Asia, she was subordinate; and in the centre of the world's stage, in Europe, on which the main stream of cultural evolution had settled, she occupied a lower position than ever. Her social position varied; but her legal position was infamous, and her political position that of a serf. Without going so far as to say, with Mrs. Cady Stanton (_Woman's Bible_), that "mankind touched the lowest depth of degradation," I will be content for the moment to say that all that woman had won in ancient Rome was entirely lost, and I will glance at the needful qualifications later. The first point of interest is to determine why the thread of woman's development was broken off for a thousand years.