the public duties of women should have made most progress amongst the English-speaking race, the founders of the Constitutional form of Government.

Of all the great Indo-Germanic races, the AngloSaxon has kept closest to the free and open life of the early Aryans and has preserved best that idea of companionship between men and women of which traces remain in prehistoric times of other races. The AngloSaxon, like all other of the early Aryan systems of jurisprudence, looked on women as under the guardianship of men, but their idea of that protection was modified by their preference for life in separate independent homesteads, rather than in wall-begirt cities,— thus whereas the early Roman law construed protection as complete absorption of the will and the possessions of the wife, the Saxon law construed it as ensuring to women their share of personal independence.1

It is part of the continuity of history that when the feudal co-ordination of Society under Sovereign Lords invoked the careful protection of hereditary rights, possessions and titles and honours were transmitted by right of birth. Though the "spear side" was held of first importance and had first place in those days of warlike nurture, still the "spindle side" was never permitted to succumb. Other things being equal, birth, not sex, determined the devolution of responsibilities. The

1 Those who would study this point will find much of value in the monograph Married Women's Property in Anglo-Saxon and Norman Law, by Florence Griswold Buckstaff, published by the American Academy of Political and Social Science; also in the articles on the above by Miss Sara Entrican, B.A., in Englishwoman's Review of October 1896 and April 1897.

Seal of Mary de St. Paul, Countess of Pembroke. Died 1377. One of the peeresses summoned to send representatives to the Council of the King (35th Edward III.). Daughter of the Earl of St. Paul in France, married Audomar de Valentia, Earl of Pembroke, who was killed in a tournament on their marriage day. Founder of Pembroke College, Cambridge. (From a cast of the seal in the Harleian MSS., British Museum.)

seals of women were as much tokens of their own act and deed as the seals of men.

The maintenance of orderly conduct amongst their retainers, by court of frank pledge, and other territorial obligations, devolved on the holder of the manor, irrespective of that holder being lord or lady. So too the duty of providing men and arms for the King's wars.

No one wishes the conditions of those times revived. The right over life and death can no more be passed back from the Justices of the Crown to the territorial magnate, than the old assize of bread and ale satisfy modern requirements. But we still owe much to those conditions. When we resent the too great care that the law still at times shows for property rather than for persons, it is well to remember that it was the respect for property-the exaggerated respect, it may be-which compelled recognition of the woman's heritage, and preserved to the public conscience the perception that public duties are not exclusively male. The salient instance of this perception is of course our hereditary monarchy. It has been saved by its very visible position in the fabric of the State, so that the lustre of our Sovereign Queens could not be hidden, while various smaller parochial rights have survived rather by careless oblivion of their existence, than by desire for their preservation.

It is too much forgotten that the sovereign rights of the Queen's Majesty are safeguarded by 'the statute passed in the first year of the reign of Queen Mary, "An Act that the regal power of this Realm is as full in the Queen's Majesty as ever it was in her noble

ancestors." But it was not till Lord Romilly's Act in 1850 that the every-day rights of ordinary women were safeguarded in the interpretation of the law, and by that time those which made for her independent status as a citizen had been gradually set aside, whether by statute or by non-user.

The text of the first of these Acts may be studied in Appendix A.

§2. The Advent of Discouragement.

Whatever the disadvantages of the feudal system, whatever the hindrance its organization interposed for the development of the higher at the expense of the lower ranks of Society, the feudal system did one great service to women, by its carefulness to preserve hereditary rights. There was thus a high tradition always present of what women might do. Though such occurrences as the appointment of a woman as custodian of a castle, or her succession to the office of sheriff (where such office was hereditary), or her liability to attend the King in council and in camp, or her power to grant charters, or to vote for the knights of the shire. were not frequent-still they were facts that actually happened; when they did happen there was nothing extraordinary or exceptional about them; they were incidents in the natural order of things.

The question of who was the right person for the right place was chiefly a question of birth. It has now come to be chiefly a question of popular election, and it was in the period of transition from the days of determination by inheritance, to the days of determina