Our story of the evolution of woman's position recalls this old ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries, between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors, is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be extinguished until it is laid on the altar. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism. The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their "white terror" with instinctive resentment; though England had shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of independence.