of dress, for example, and personal appointments—so that, even in England to-day, shops groan with costly objects all provided for women. In Rome the women's extravagance was such that the legislators, in dismay, made a whole series of new laws to restrain it. All this was vain. It was as though one should put up toy-mills to stem the Atlantic. Every writer notes how much more rapid was the process of corruption in woman than in man, but surely it would be folly to suppose that the descent to Avernus is easier for the more conservative feminine sex than for the more active masculine one. Gide puts his finger on the real cause of the woman's swifter decline. She had nothing to bind her outside the walls of her own little sheltering-place. She had no Vision of the world beyond, of which her own home was but a part. Men had the Vision, and if Rome's fate had depended alone on them Rome would not have fallen so soon.
“Even when the man's private life was corrupt he could preserve, at least for a time, his civic virtues, the morality that he had acquired as a responsible member of the body politic.” Yes, but with the woman it was otherwise. For her the whole moral code of life was narrowed down to her duty as a house or home keeper. She had not to think of the city, of the State, of the race. She knew nothing of the weighty considerations that bind those who have to remember the interests not of one family, but of thousands of families, in any act or at any moment. The senate house, the tribunal, did not awaken in her any solemn or binding thought, nor had she any acquired
