sought his ideal of political liberty, when he endeavored to demonstrate that lawmakers should remember the needs of the people as well as the pleasure of the King. In England, where the constitution of the country did not seem quite so perfect as in France, his work gave to current thought that democratic tendency which was to be confirmed by Rousseau's revolutionary theory that "nan is born free;" man is born free;" and he is everywhere in chains. For to the new social philosopher it was not sufficient that the interests of the people should be occasionally remembered by Parliaments and statesmen; freedom would not truly have been secured until human liberty, human equality, was made the end of all government. Natural, and not simply religious and political, rights were what men should claim for themselves. Rousseau exhorted them to remember a fact that they had striven for long cen turies to ignore i.e., that they were not solely subjects of their hereditary ruler, not solely citizens of the country in which they happened to be born, but primarily, and above all things, human beings.

It is true that his doctrine of the abstract rights of human beings was never very popular in England, but it had its followers-its Godwins and Paines-and, most certainly, its effect upon philosophical and political reasoning. Moreover, the new turn of affairs in the American colonies gave the democratic problem a more vital importance to all Englishmen. Theories of political liberty had been realized by the constitutions of many of the different colonies, notably that of Pennsy Ivania. But so long as all were nominally subject to England their freedom at home was cheerfully overlooked. But when they joined the open revolt, when they rebelled against the mother country, when they formed for themselves a new government based upon the purest democratic principles, their practical application of the doctrine of political liberty attracted the attention of all England-indeed, of all Europe. The result, then, of Rousseau's revolutionary social creed and of the American rebellion was that never, since the days of Oliver Cromwell, had Englishmen been so preoccupied with the problem of human freedom as in the second half of the eighteenth century; and it is to this second half that Mary

But, while the Democrats of the seventeenth century were concerned altogether with the political answer to the question, the new champions of human liberty, who belonged to the school of Rousseau, were seeking to reduce it to its first principles, and to find its solution by determining what were man's rights as a human being. This gave it an entirely new aspect in inore ways than one, but even Rousseau had failed to understand that his arguments, pushed to their logical conclusion, must revolutionize not only all human, but all sexual, relations. Though he went beyond the Anarchists in his hatred of the social slavery to which man had so long been reduced, he was content to maintain that woman was made for the pleasure of man. And yet, while there was nothing inconsistent in Montesquieu's belief that woman is but a charming child, in Diderot's that she is but a courtesan, in Voltaire's that she is not worth theorizing about, Rousseau's feminine ideal was in direct contradiction to his conception of humanity. He could not have denied that women, too, are human beings; according to his own teachings, therefore, they must have certain human rights, whatever may be their sexual functions. He might remain, consciously or unconsciously, blind to this inevitable deduction from the premises of the Contrat Social, but it was impossible that the eyes of his followers should likewise continue forever closed. That the woman question had hitherto been reserved for discussion in Utopia is not to be wondered at, since in the actual state it had not yet been conceded that all men have social and political rights, while it had never occurred to legislators that woman was anything but a negative quantity; it would have seemed as sensible to pretend that children and animals had rights. Even in the Church, where they might be supposed to be the equals of men, George Fox alone had offered them spiritual equality. But now that the abstract rights of human beings were to be considered, it was inevitable that the fact that buman beings are male and female should be recognized in its full meaning, and that the distinction established by custom between men and women should be found illogical and arbitrary.

It is curious that Rousseau, who objected so strenuously to all shams and conventionalities that he urged for man a return to a state of nature, should not have seen that the sacrifice of reality to appearances must be as bad for women. No one, save the insignificant Dr. Fordyces and Dr. Gregorys of the eighteenth century, has ever set up so odious an ideal of womanhood as he did in his Sophia; it seems but a just retaliation that he who would have shamefully subjected woman--mentally, morally, and physically-to man, should be indirectly the cause of the first declaration of her rights. It was his demand for the natural freedom of all human beings that inspired Mary Wollstonecraft to write her Vindication, that inspired the French pioneers to espouse the cause of female emancipation. Condorcet's paper on Woman Suffrage appeared a year before Mary Wollstonecraft's book, and as this was the work of six weeks, and as her knowledge of the French language was only less than her interest in French affairs, it is very improbable that she had read his statement of the case; but, nevertheless, she owed her principal inspiration to the Contrat Social.

It is interesting and significant to compare the English woman's treatment of the subject, in an England where there was no extreme of royal tyranny to hurry men to the other extreme of anarchy, with that of the French philosopher in a France where men, in the first enthusiasm of successful rebellion against their tyrants, were endeavoring to do the impossible and pull down old systems and build up new ones at the same time. Both Mary Wollstonecraft and Condorcet were animated to an unusual degree by the love of humanity. But in England the people had still to be aroused to a full realization of their natural rights as human beings: in France they were already preparing to establish these by political means. It was thus inevitable that the woman without power in the State should aim chiefly at demonstrating that the old sexual ideals were false, while the statesinan, called upou to assist in framing a new constitution, should dwell upon the political disabilities of woman.

The chief end of Mary Wollstonecraft's book, therefore, was to awaken mankind to the knowledge that women are human beings, and to insist that they should be

given the chance to assert their human rights, and that their sex should become a secondary consideration. It is so long since men have honestly believed that the sole duty of a woman is to please and be useful to them and to render their lives easy and agreeable, as Rousseau taught, that many may wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft gave so much space to the refutation of silly arguments. But that which seems the apotheosis of silliness to us was serious enough in her day. Even from the pulpit, preachers bade women pray because of the new graces and attractions piety gave to creatures whose only object in life was to be charming in the eyes of men. Health and strength, knowledge and freedom, were all to be sacrificed for the sake of the superior sex, supposed to look upon weakness, ignorance, and deference as the highest feminine qualities; while the emptiness of woman's life under the old order of things is nowhere better expressed than in Wilberforce's naïve rejoicing over the condition of unmarried women, once they were allowed to devote themselves to works of charity; "for really," he exclaims, "there seemed to be nothing useful in which they could be naturally busy, but now they may always find an object in attending to the poor Mary Wollstonecraft knew but too well, from her own experience, all the indignities which woman was forced to suffer because of the artificial conception of her sexual status, and all the pettiness and egoism to which her training had degraded her. She had lived in a home made unbearable to wife and children alike by the brutality of the husband and father, who must still be looked up to as a superior being; she had helped her sister in her flight from an unworthy husband; she had been governess in a family where the mother had cultivated feminine sensibility until her dogs had grown dearer to her than her children; and she had further learned how almost impossible it was for those of her sex who were forced to support themselves to find honest work to do. When she herself had come up to London to actually live by her literary work, had she not seemed the first of a new genus"?

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Lowered by her subjection to man, woman was given no chance to escape from it. Trained solely to serve his ends, she was allowed no other duty in life

Were she left alone and penniless, then she became in truth and indeed an outcast; if her husband were a brute or a villain, she was without redress; if she fulfilled the ideai set up for her, she was no better than a coquette or a harlot, for whom there was no use or place once her youth was spent. It was against these indignities that Mary Wollstonecraft rebelled with all the strength of a nature, at once sensitive and independent, impetuous and proud. In this connection it will not be amiss to quote from a forgotten paper by George Eliot, in the Leader of October 13th, 1855, in which she makes a comparison between Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. "In both writers," she says, we discern, under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful nature, the beating of a true woman's heart, which teaches them not to undervalue the smallest office of domestic care or kindliness. But Margaret Fuller, with all her passionate sensibility, is more of the literary woman, who would not have been satisfied without intellectual production; Mary Wollstonecraft, we imagine, wrote not at all for writing's sake, but for the pressure of other motives." Her un

restrained vehemence makes one feel how much of herself she put into her work. Again and again, in words that are forcible despite their pompousness, she denounces the social system that refuses to see in woman anything but her sex, she exposes the rottenness of virtue based upon ignorance, she proves the immorality of an education that is devoted to perfecting girls in the art of pleasing. Women are human beings as well as men; let them be treated as such-this is the beginning and end of the Vindication. That she had considered woman's political claims and believed in their legitimacy is more than likely. In her Dedication to Talleyrand she reminds him that the framers of the new French constitution would be tyrants like their predecessors if they did not allow women to participate in it; and, further on, she writes quite frankly: "I really think that women ought to have representatives instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of the Government." But it was not to the Sophias, not to the Lady Kingsboroughs, with whom England was filled, that the power could be entrusted.

Women must be developed from their stage of puppetdom into true women before their political needs could be inquired into. And so also with their industrial pursuits. She did, indeed, urge their proper education at length and with some warmth, for if women were not educated she felt that they would stop the progress of knowledge, that they could never become the equals of men.

As George Eliot, in the paper to which I have referred, puts it, there is no medium between the old plan of corporal discipline and that thorough education of women which will make them rational beings in the highest sense of the word." And Mary Wollstonecraft also pointed out certain professions, such as that of medicine, for which women were eminently adapted. But her plea for their education, her suggestions for their possible pursuits, were only incidental as it were. To her, the most important thing of all was to convince women of their sacred rights as human beings, to convince man of the evil wrought by the degradation of

women into mere creatures of sex.

Condorcet, whose love for humanity was so great that, as he wrote jestingly to Voltaire, he had always held Gargantua in aversion because of his eating the six pilgrims in his salad, had also discovered the flaw in Rousseau's reasoning, and had seen clearly that if it were in their capacity as human beings that men had rights, then women could consistently advance the same claims. But these arguments he used solely to establish woman suffrage in the new and regenerated France. The habit or custom, he declared, which had made men accept the violation of their natural rights as a matter of course, is altogether the reason why woman was deprived of all participation in political or social lawmaking. To show that this deprivation is not an act of tyranny it would be necessary to prove that the natural rights of women are not absolutely the same as those of men, or that they are not capable of exercising them. His argument here is not unlike that of Socrates in the Republic. The rights of man are born solely of the fact that he is a reasonable being, susceptible of acquiring moral ideas and reasoning upon them. And so woman, having these same qualities, has necessarily the same rights. Either no one individual of the human species has any real

rights, or all have the same; and he who votes against the right of another, of whatever religion, color, or sex, has from thenceforward abjured his own. That inan is intellectually woman's superior can never be believed until both receive the same education; and after all, he asks, are political rights reserved only for men of intellect or genius? The shortcomings of the sex are due to their prolonged slavery. It is therefore unjust to allege as a reason for continuing to deprive them of their rights, a weakness which is solely the result of this deprivation. If such reasoning be accepted, all free government must come to an end. And as for the plea that they are needed in another sphere, where they can be more truly useful, is it not in the name of utility that Africans are condemned to slavery; was it not in the name of utility that the Bastille was filled with prisoners? It will always be a small number who can actively serve in affairs of state. By giving women their rights there is as little danger of taking them from their household as of taking the peasant from the plough or the artisan from his workshop when their political independence is insured. And by this political change domestic morals will be improved. Condorcet, like another Socrates, challenges the world to show him any natural difference between man and woman. That his challenge was not answered to his satisfaction is shown by his return to the subject when writing in his hiding-place in Mlle. Vernel's garret, after he had felt but too well the evil effects of man's sudden possession of his natural rights. Few of the modern champions of female emancipation have stated the case as fairly and thoroughly as Condorcet; I know of not one, save Mr. Karl Pearson, who has been so logical.

Indeed, the only difference between Mary Wollstonecraft's manner of treating the subject and Condorcet's was not to be attributed solely to their point of view. It was due to their methods quite as well. Condorcet's style was not very much better than Mary's, though a critical Godwin would not have found in it the faults of grammar and construction which displeased him in the Vindication. But if Mary's style was pompous, Condorcet's was heavy and declamatory, too much after the fashion of his day. In this respect there is, comparatively speaking, but

Condorcet,

little choice to be made. however, was a scholar and philosopher, a member of the Academy, and a statesman he was nothing if not logical and scholarly. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, was a woman without education, save that which she had given herself, without experience in the study or the council chamber. She, in her work, relied upon impulse, and was wholly without plan or system. Instinct had led her to see the truth to which Condorcet's eyes had been opened by reason. And where he argued from a strong sense of abstract right, she wrote from a stronger knowledge of concrete suffering. He was the man, she the woman of the eighteenth century; and perhaps there could be no better proof of the justice of her demand for woman's education than the faults in her own work. Had she to her own sad experience joined such an education as Condorcet had received, her book would probably have had twice its power, twice its influence.

But however that may have been, certain it is that, though the world intellectually was prepared for the teachings of English and French advocates of woman's rights, practically it was far from ready to receive them. The time had not yet come for even men, with all their aspirations as human beings, to rejoice in their natural rights. They could throw off the old royal yoke, but a social and political growth that required years and centuries to perfect it, could not be suddenly brought about even by royal executions and reigns of terror. Poor man still waits for the happy day when he may return tɔ the much vaunted state of nature. Woman's fate in the France where Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality had been declared was even sadder. From the beginning Condorcet, though he had an ally in the Abbé Sieyès, had had for opponents such men as Mirabeau, who protested against everything that savored of female liberty; Danton, who could see in women only caterers to his sensuality; and Robespierre, whose scheme of human emancipation omitted one-half of the human species. Hardly had woman been assured that her political claims were as sound as man's, hardly had she commenced to exercise her rights as citoyenne or tricoteuse, than she was bidden officially to return to the domestic hearth which she

had had no business to leave. The Convention decided that women could not be granted political privileges, or allowed to form political clubs, or take any part in the government of the country. "Remember your sex, let morals be respected," Chaumette, who had once inscribed upon their banner," Elles ont balayé les tyrans devant elles," now told those who came into the courts or to the bar of the Assembly. Since when, he virtuously asked, is it decent to see women abandoning the pious care of the househoid? Woman's despotism is that of love, and consequently that of nature ! Here was the true definition of her natural rights—a melancholy sequel to Condorcet's brave arguments but three years before. Little hope was there for women in the France of the Empire, or, for many a day, in the France of the Republic.

And in England, Mary Wollstonecraft's name for long years was covered with infamy and contempt. The picture of her given in Chalmer's Dictionary was popularly accepted, and the immorality of her doctrines, as well as the unwomanliness of her conduct, taken for granted. Women remained the puppets she had found them; they still clung to their one recognized right-that of pleasing.

The

But almost imperceptibly the change for the better began, and now that a hundred years have passed since the world was first startled by the new discovery that women have rights, many of these have been irrevocably secured. gradual emancipation of women which the last fifty years have witnessed, shows very clearly that of its two pioneers of the last century, the woman who relied upon her instinct better understood the exigencies of the case, than the man who was wholly ruled by reason. Condorcet insisted upon the immediate accomp'ishment of the great end of the new movement; Mary Wollstonecraft would have urged rather the adoption, one by one, of the means which must eventually lead to it. consequence is that to-day, when the political sphere in which Condorcet would have placed women has only just been opened to them, all the new privileges which Mary Wollstonecraft demanded have already been granted. Though unfortunately too many women still remain the social puppets and shopping dolls Mr. Pearson has called them, the ideal of womanhood is certainly different from

The

that of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to imagine a Rousseau to-day being seriously listened to if he preached that woman was made for man's pleasure. The change of feeling in this respect was very strikingly emphasized when, about eighteen months ago, Ibsen's Nora was played in London; for all the soulful discussion to which the performance gave rise, the disinterested spectator could not but feel that, while the moral might be all very revolutionary and edifying in Scandinavian countries, in England it was decidedly behind the times, for the English or American Nora who continued to live in her Doll's house would have but herself to thank. When the whole country was but yesterday ringing with the late triumphs of women students at Cambridge, it would be useless to do more than point out that Mary Wollstonecraft's theory of female education has been realized beyond her most ardent hopes. True, her suggestion for the co-education of the sexes has not been carried out, but something very like it already exists at the Universi ties, where women are allowed to come up for the examinations, and the Public School System in the United States virtually meets her views on national education. Woman's economic position, though it is not yet what the most radical reformers would have it, could not fail to satisfy Mary Wollstonecraft's ideal womanly independence. That her instinct was not at fault when she recommended the pursuit of medicine for women, the success of women doctors to day proves beyond dispute.

of

And so it is that doctrines, which in the eighteenth century were held to be subversive of all morality, are now thought to be its very basis. If practically there is nothing more to be learned from Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, since all its theories have become facts, the new edition so soon to appear will have served its purpose, if it remind women of the old state of slavery from which they have so recently been freed the social and domestic slavery which is always so much more unbearable than the most unjust political disabilities. Men, as well as women, cannot but be thankful that the old sexual relations, once justified by custom and idealized by poets and philosophers, have been done away with, let it be hoped forever.-Fortnightly Review.