not properly
be used until time has spun into the vista of the past peoples as
vigorous, if not influential, as the one that stands, the inheritor
of their virility, at the apex of modern civilization, whose women,
clasping hands throughout the British Empire, form a splendid chain
of hope for womankind in all the world.

Whether or not continuity and sequence, relation and effect, have been
maintained in the retraversing of the footsteps of woman in all ages
of the history of those isles where femininity has flowered in the
most gracious blossoms, it remains for the reader to say. Certain
it is that unaffected pleasure has been afforded the writer in his
attempt to draw aside the curtain that the muse of history jealously
employs to shut from view the inner sanctuary in which she preserves
those vital relics, the destruction of which by some inconceivable
iconoclast would bring death to the world for lack of materials for
reflection and inspiration. In treating of the prehistoric periods,
although the brush necessarily has been laid broadly upon the canvas,
fancy has been kept in the leash of fact, and imagination given no
more play than its legitimate function. Still, the results of inquiry
into the status of woman at this far remote period furnish a fulcrum
upon which to rest the lever of investigation, in order to lift
into view the strata of undoubted history of the periods immediately
subsequent.

As fast as the widening of social interest afforded the materials for
use, the writer sought to employ them, until, like a mountain rivulet,
ever widening until it reaches the plain, he found himself embarrassed
by the wealth of fact that told the marvellous story of the most
notable emancipation in the history of mankind,--the complete
separation of English woman from the trammels, inherent and
environmental, imposed upon the sex. If the successive chapters
disclose the philosophical relations of woman in society, it will be
because the reader has not failed to grasp the fact that in any such
theme as the one treated mere continuity of subject matter would
constitute a chronicle and not a history; and that the writer, while
seeking not to make obtrusive the connective tissue, has nevertheless
given ample scope for the reflective mind to see that which has ever
been present to his own.

As to the actual materials employed in constructing the book, it is
sufficient to say that no important writer upon any period of th