But it would be mere affectation to ignore the influence of their change of religion, and I will briefly show how this affected the position of woman. The greatest positive injustice that was done to woman was in the sphere of law, and Sir Henry Maine has shown that all the injustice done to woman in later European law was due to the overruling of Roman and Teutonic law by the Canon Law of the Church. The loss of social liberty and prestige can be clearly traced to the same root. Under the influence of the Judaic spirit which was now incorporated in Christianity, most of the early leaders of the Church spoke of woman and marriage in terms that the duller wit and coarser feeling of the following centuries only too literally received. I have already observed that modern science is disposed to seek the origin of most of the Western civilisations in the ferment of tribes that filled the south-western offshoot of Asia some thousands of years before Christ, and that these tribes held very varying attitudes in regard to their women. The Hebrews probably represent one of these Semitic tribes in the north of the region between Babylonia and Palestine. From the southern desert, or the steppe-region leading to the desert, they invade Palestine, assimilate its civilisation, and evolve into the monarchy with which we are so familiar. It seems that the Hebrews came of one of those Bedouin tribes that kept their women in close subjection, and the later Judaic law preserved the tradition of the time when a boy meant a new spear to the tribe, and a girl only a future breeder of men. The wife was virtually the property of her husband, and could not inherit. He could divorce her when he willed, and had a right to her unconditional obedience. Few Hebrew women broke through this rigid system of subordination and left their names in the growing literature.