With the recent opening of Japan to modern culture the Chinese ideal is being discredited and the abuses it engendered are being suppressed. Women are receiving ample and rational education; a man is forbidden (since 1875) to sell his wife or daughter; the _joshiwaras_ are being thrust out of sight; and the Western spirit is slowly entering the minds of the women. Japan is plainly falling under the action of the general law. With the growth of higher culture the inequalities of the sexes are found to be artificial, mischievous, and unjust, and the position of woman improves. The main principles of the _bushido_ are not likely to be lost in the growth of Japan, but they are now held in a living and progressive sense. What Kung-fu-tse laid down as the duties of woman may or may not have been right and expedient 2,500 years ago. To-day they have an unmistakable aspect of masculine dictation and despotism. However, it is the culture of the West that has opened the new era in Japan and China and India, and we return to Europe to see how woman fared in what proved, after all, to be the chief theatre of the evolution of civilisation. CHAPTER VII. RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION FROM the broad survey of the world during the Middle Age of the Christian era, which I have made in the last chapter, we pass to the modern phase of woman's evolution. The trite old proverb, that "the darkest hour is that before the dawn," is, in this application, a singular and literal truth. From the comparative elevation of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisation, the cause of woman had sunk gradually, with occasional rebounds, to the lowest point it ever touched within the limits of civilisation. Half-a-dozen distinct civilisations lay over the world, cut off from each other by oceans that scorned their frail vessels, or by impassable deserts or mountain-chains; and in all of them the position of woman was one of great and unjust subordination. At first glance it may seem that the facts are not consistent with the idea of a steady evolution of woman's position. It must be borne in mind, however, that I merely affirm a development of woman's political position in close relation to the development of culture, and then the situation offers little difficulty. The civilisations of North and South America, in which woman's position was relatively better than in Europe, were not suffered to develop fully their native resources. The civilisation of India was constricted in lethal bonds that arrested all growth of culture; nor would it be difficult to show that the position into which its women were forced was largely responsible for the degeneration. China, too, had made the mistake of stereotyping its moral and social standards, though these were much higher, and was content to maintain, instead of developing, its culture. Japan, fascinated by the high moral idealism of China, too readily contracted its formalism and conservatism.