right to give. Even in our own country and our own time this theory is
not altogether extinct. The papers only recently contained an account of
the brutal beating of a woman by a man. The woman in remonstrating
cried, "You have no right to beat me! I am not your wife!"

During the Middle Ages, and indeed well into the nineteenth century,
possession of property by women was confined to the unmarried, the
entire control and practical ownership passing to the husband upon
marriage.

Change comes at last to even the most fossilized thought. One by one,
social institutions clung to with fiercest tenacity fell away. Barbaric
independence had followed Greek and Roman slavery, which in turn was
succeeded by feudal servitude, to reappear once more in the
affranchised communes. Each experiment had its season, and sunk into the
darkness of the past, to give place to a new one, which must transmit to
posterity the principal and interest of all preceding ones. But though
progress when taken in the mass is plain, the individual years in each
generation show small trace of it. Even as late as the sixteenth
century, the workman fared little better than the brutes. Erasmus tells
us that their houses had no chimneys, and their floors were bare ground;
while Fortescue, who travelled in France at the same time, reports a
misery and degradation which have had vivid portraiture in Taine's
"Ancien Régime."

A flood of wealth poured in on the discovery of the New World. The
invention of gunpowder put a new face upon warfare, and that of printing
made possible the cheap and wide dissemination of long-smouldering
ideas. Economic problems perplexed every country, and on all sides
methods of solving them were put in action. Sully, who found in Henry