Many estimates of women’s inferiority have ultimately an economic basis. The more lucrative trades and professions are those for which it is considered that women are temperamentally unfit. It is a noticeable fact that all these general conceptions of women’s weakness have always been closely connected with their legal status. In Athens, where women could not hold property, and an heiress was taken over by the nearest male relative as a necessary encumbrance on the estate, the estimate of woman’s character was very low. In Alexandria and at Rome, where women by various devices outwitted the law and became possessed of some degree of economic independence, their moral position also changed for the better. In England feminism begins with the Married Women’s Property Act. But as long as slavery, social or economic, is not recognised by the law, it cannot be the curse that it was to ancient life. In Athens it was a legal institution, owing its validity to much the same mode of thought as made the wife also her husband’s chattel. It is the business of lawyers to defend the law, and, if the law is bad, their moral sense is necessarily warped in the process; so that it is not surprising if the private speeches of the Attic orators, although they exhibit the natural subtlety of the Athenians in a striking light, by no means give an equally strong impression of moral rectitude. All the orators are the same in this respect. Demosthenes in matters of State was a high-minded patriot; as a lawyer he is, like the rest of his colleagues, a professional liar, and does not scruple to falsify and misrepresent the truth. Lysias so forgets the man in the advocate that he seems to reserve his highest powers for his worst cases, and obviously delights in such a client as the shameless old cripple for whom he writes his most ingenious speech. Isæus has no regard for veracity, and it has been found by painful experience that his unsupported statements, even on simple questions of fact, are, to put it mildly, extremely unreliable. As for Hyperides, he is careless of shame so long as he wins his case; and his gesture, as he bids his fair client display her charms, is like the calculated boldness of the slave-dealer offering his girls to the highest bidder. But if the orators give us an impression of cunning subtlety which far transcends the bounds that we even now allow to lawyers, their clients are in no better case. By the middle of the fourth century Athens was in full decadence. Her men had lost all the vigour and courage that brought their country safe through the dangers of the Persian Wars: her women, perhaps, were even worse than the men—_corruptio optimi pessima_—and had sunk into a state of utter degradation.