At some date in the remote future, when the story of woman's disabilities is ended the world over, the historian will probably regard that millennium as the darkest age for woman in the whole long story. A curious hesitation seems to have come over the fates. Up to this point the main stream of human development had flowed steadily towards Europe. The dying civilisations of Asia and Africa had made way for Greece, and Greece had turned the stream into Italy, to be spread from there in fertile flood over half the soil of Europe. Then civilisation almost disappeared in Europe, and for a time it looked as though the line of development would be taken up by some other race. Either unknown or very dimly known to Europe there were civilisations growing far out on the frontiers of its world that could very well outstrip it, as it floundered in the morass of the Middle Ages; and we may glance shortly at the position of woman in those distant races before we come to the awakening of Europe. In the as yet unknown continent of America, into which some branch of the Mongolians had pushed before the northern land-bridge broke, two races had, by the Middle Ages, reached the upper stages of barbarism, and were climbing to civilisation. Since it is certain that Mexico and Peru developed quite independently of Europe, and probably independently of each other, their resemblance to medieval Europe is remarkable. They were feudal monarchies, with very powerful bodies of clergy, so that the general conditions were not favourable to woman. Education in Mexico was advanced, but under purely religious control, and vast numbers of the girls passed into the celibate state in the innumerable nunneries, to teach and embroider and capture little nuns in their turn. The girl who married (at from eleven to eighteen years of age) did not choose her partner, and passed from obedience to her father under the equal authority of her husband. She was not treated harshly, and polygamy was very exceptional. But the law imposed unequal punishment on her for unfaithfulness, and she was the greater sufferer by that ghastly evil of the Mexican religion--human sacrifice. In Peru the position of woman was generally better. For the great mass of the population there was little freedom, and the woman had few relative disabilities. She worked in the fields with the men, under a _régime_ of what one might call highly centralised feudalism, and seems to have been respected in the home. All political power was kept in the hands of the Incas, who had immense harems, and who married their sisters even more frequently than had been done in Egypt.