The peculiarity of England's development is that in its case we seem to have the only exception to the law I formulated--that the position of woman improves with the growth of culture. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century culture enormously advanced, and the position of woman steadily deteriorated. In the early decades of the seventeenth century we find an Englishwoman, Anne Clifford, struggling against the monarch for the hereditary right to a high office. Women burgesses and landowners could still share the election of parliamentary representatives; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century this right was taken from them, and the sex-disability was imposed. Sir Edward Coke, relying chiefly on St. Paul's injunctions to women, successfully removed the last trace of the old Teutonic ideal. Here, at first sight, is an apparent exception to our alliance of feminism and culture; but, in reality, we have a number of modifying circumstances. The long lawlessness of the Middle Ages had made men less and less disposed to see women in office or in public life. The head, even of a manor, needed to be a soldier in those days. Women often proved capable enough of inspiring and directing their followers, but it is quite intelligible that there was a strong tendency towards discouraging or preventing women from holding office in such turbulent times. And with this tendency was joined the even worse influence of the canon law of the Church. When we find a great lawyer like Sir Edward Coke refusing the testimony of women, on grounds of sex, we see at once how this fatal sentiment had been gradually permeating the mind of England. It had put woman in a deplorable legal position--or, rather, a position outside the law--and it inevitably fostered the notion of woman's inferiority and incapacity. Before the end of the eighteenth century we find legal writers classing women with "infants, idiots, and lunatics" in illustrating "natural incapacity." In this way the growth of culture came to be, in England, associated with a deterioration in the position of women; but the circumstance does not invalidate our law, as the retrogression was plainly due to such extraneous causes as the permeation of our life with the spirit and letter of the canon law, as Sir Henry Maine has shown.