208 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



and it is not uncommon to hear the position of women 

 spoken of as one of the tests of general civilisation. If 

 this were so, and if progress were continuous arid were 

 something that affected the life of society all round, the 

 inference would be that the study of history would reveal 

 a continuous advance in the position of women from slavery 

 to equality. This view will not stand the most cursory 

 examination of the data. Among the historical peoples 

 the position of women has more than once been far higher 

 in many important respects than it was in the times of our 

 fathers, and among savages it is by no means uniformly 

 low. It is, in fact, affected by other causes than the general 

 level of culture, and at certain stages the advance of culture 

 has probably affected it injuriously. Take, again, political 

 freedom. It is an ideal towards which the modern world 

 . is still striving. It was in large measure realised by Greece 

 and Rome and the mediaeval city. True, if we look 

 deeper we find that freedom for us has a fuller meaning and 

 a larger scope. It is not to be denied that there are essen- 

 tial differences between a modern and an ancient democracy. 

 But in the interval between them it would be true to say 

 that there were periods when the idea of political freedom 

 was dead. By no stretch of imagination could we repre- 

 sent the measure of political freedom to which the modern 

 world has attained as something towards which the art of 

 government has moved by successive steps all pointing in 

 the same direction. The most that we can say in these and 

 W countless similar cases is that, when we consider the life of 

 humanity as a whole and compare our own civilisation with 

 the whole series of earlier forms, together with their sur- 

 vivals at the present day, there appears, when all actions 

 and reactions are set against one another, a certain net 

 movement. 



Now if we take social life on its many different sides and 

 consider the development of each, it is quite possible that 

 we shall find a broad coincidence in the net movement, 

 along with great variation in the steps by which that net 

 movement is achieved. But for our purpose, which is that 

 of appreciating the actual result of social evolution up to 

 the present time, it is the net movement which is of primary 



