or their honor, and not infrequently it robbed them of all these three together.  Those who, like Tiberius and Agrippina, defended the ancient Roman tradition, were hated, hounded, and defamed with a no less angry fury than Caligula and Nero, who sought to destroy it.  No one of them, whatever his tendencies or intentions, succeeded in making himself understood by his times or by posterity; it was their common fate to be misunderstood, and therefore horribly calumniated.  The destiny of the women was even more tragic than that of the men, for the times demanded from them, as a compensation for the great honor of belonging to this privileged family, that they possess all the rarest and most difficult virtues.

What was the cause of all this? we ask.  How were so many catastrophes possible, and how could tradition have erred so grievously?  It is almost a crime that posterity should virtually always have studied and pondered this immense tragedy of history on the basis of the crude and superficial falsification of it which Tacitus has given us.  For few episodes in general history impress so powerfully upon the mind the fact that the progress of the world is one of the most tragic of its phenomena.  Especially is such knowledge necessary to the favored generations of prosperous and easy times.  He who has not lived in those years when an old world is disappearing and a new one making its way cannot realize the tragedy of life, for at such times the old is still sufficiently strong to resist the assaults of the new, and the latter, though growing, is not yet strong enough to annihilate that world on the ruins of which alone it will be able to prosper.  Men are then called upon to solve insoluble problems and to attempt enterprises which are both necessary and impossible.  There is confusion everywhere, in the mind within and in the world without.  Hate often separates those who ought to aid one another, since they are tending toward the same goal, and sympathy binds men together who are forced to do battle with one another.  At such times women generally suffer more than men, for every change which occurs in their situation seems more dangerous, and it is right that it should be so.  For woman is by nature the vestal of our species, and for that reason she must be more conservative, more circumspect, and more virtuous than man.  There is no state or civilization which has comprehended the highest things in life which has not been forced to instil into its women rather than into its men the sense for all those virtues upon which depend the stability of the family and the future of the race.  And for every era this is a question of life and death.  In such periods when one world is dying and another coming to birth, all conceptions become confused, and all attempts bring forth bizarre results.  He who wishes to preserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems virtue.  Precisely for this reason it is more difficult for a woman than for a man to succeed in fulfilling her proper mission, for she is more exposed to the danger of losing her way and of missing her particular function; and since she is more likely to fail in realizing her natural destiny, she is more likely to be doomed to a life of misfortune.