In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman may succeed to the throne must be qualified.  In three countries only, England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of succession on terms approaching equality with men.  In these three countries when a monarch dies leaving no sons his eldest daughter becomes the sovereign.  If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children at all, the oldest daughter—­failing sons—­of the man who was in his lifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirs more remote.  Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being the only child of the late king’s deceased brother and heir, the Duke of Kent.

Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, although dispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain.

In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman may succeed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown is dead.  Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because the House of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, on account of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy of Luxemburg.

Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countries described, lives under what is known as the Salic Law, according to which a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign.

A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of it permeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move, and have their legal and social being.

The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they occupied at the time the code was formulated.  Later the Salian Franks, as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor of the present-day city of Paris.

The Salic Law was a complete code.  It governed all matters, civil and military.  It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of a slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu lated conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.

The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals are forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed out of the memory of man,—­all except one paragraph of one division of one law.  The law related to inheritance of property; the special division distinguished between real and personal property, and the paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that she might not inherit land.