We may safely assume, as we have seen, that for a long while past, every group of newcomers into peninsular Europe has come equipped with the particular type of social organization which enabled it to make good, either on the tundra, or in the northern woodland, or on the steppe, or (if it came across the Bosphorus) on the enclosed plateaux of Asia Minor and beyond.  The tundra does not greatly concern us, for the White Sea cuts through it, and deep into the woodland, and bars off the Lapps from the Samoyeds and their kin.  Classical descriptions of the inhabitants of the North German plain make it clear that its culture, even so late as the first century B.C., was at its best a broken prolongation of the pastoral life of the steppe margin, and that less fortunate tribes either had never had cattle, like the hunting Redskins of the corresponding forest zone of North America, or had lost them since they entered the forest, and maintained themselves by hunting and robbery like the broken pastorals who infest the east edge of the Congo basin; the Chatti of Tacitus’ day enjoying tyrannous hegemony not unlike that of the Five Nations.

It is probably to this westward drift from more purely pastoral condition to less, that we must attribute the only really large unity of European civilization in the later prehistoric ages, namely, its social organization in patriarchal households linked into clans and tribes.  We may doubt whether this social type is permanently adaptable to a forest regime, any more than to industrial life.  Certainly forest folk outside peninsular Europe only display it rarely and imperfectly.  But it is characteristic of all pastoral folk; once established, it coheres and persists under great external stresses; and in early Europe its liability (strong though its structure is) to break up sooner or later into a more individualistic order, was counteracted by the recurrent drift of new grassland peoples westward from one of its principal homes.  Grassland Arabia, let us note in passing, has been performing the same function, since history began, for its own marginal neighbours from Babylonia to Palestine and Egypt.

On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs intermittently in our ‘western’ world culminates in those phases of its history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in the Femmes savantes of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France, which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the fin-de-siecle Europe of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.