It will seem, at first glance, that I have assigned the cause in saying that Roman civilisation gave way to barbarism. Goths and Vandals trod underfoot the vast and wonderful polity that the Romans had spread over Europe. Roman culture retired to the western empire, to Asia, and, at the paralysing touch of Asia, fell into the rigid, barren, stationary form that we recognise still in the Greek Church. All Europe, west of Greece, was overrun by the barbarians who had issued from the forests of Germany, as Rome grew feebler. Over England, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and north Africa the light-haired, blue-eyed giants poured, and wherever they passed the fabric of Roman civilisation fell in ruins. Is not this explanation enough? It is not, for these barbarians were of the class that treated woman with deference, not of the class that would bring into civilisation a fresh tradition of the ill treatment of their wives. It is useless to suggest that Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote an account of their ways and ideals, exaggerated their deference to their women in order to shame the Romans. His statement on the point agrees too well with the earliest Teutonic and Scandinavian poetry, and with what we know of Anglo-Saxon England; nor was Tacitus by any means a feminist. There is no serious ground whatever for doubting his statement that the "Germans" saw something sacred in woman, held that the gods spoke more clearly through her, and took her counsel on tribal issues. Yet when we find the various branches of the race settling into fixed and organised polities on the ruins of Rome, we find woman generally despised, excluded from political life, and treated with the gravest injustice in legislation. The position of woman in Europe--in England--less than a century ago dispenses us from heaping up proofs. It must be recognised at once that the extraordinary change in the surroundings of these barbaric fathers of ours would lead of itself to demoralisation. Buried for unknown centuries in the dense forests that lay between the Baltic and the Danube, they had treasured and submitted to the old traditions of their race, which favoured woman. As time goes on they encounter orderly and deadly legions, superbly armed, along the southern frontier of their region. In the early centuries of the Christian era they learn more of this wonderful race below the great river, with its impressive organisation, its shining luxury, its fairy cities, its strange religion and ideals. When the barrier falls they find themselves in a land whose mighty achievements made their old traditions seem puny and childlike, as their daubed huts or skin clothing. In that intoxication their ideals would easily grow dim, and their feeling of power amid a world of dwarfs would bode ill for woman. Thus, undoubtedly, we can explain much of the disappearance of the old Teutonic chivalry and virtue.