powerful and too universal to be attributed to any particular individual. Individuals, indeed, have expressed in the most remote periods of history what we should now consider modern ideas concerning the duties and rights of women. Plato's "Republic," Solomon's description of the virtuous woman, Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," contain arguments and theories that satisfy the most modern advocate of women's rights. But these and other indications that many master minds did not placidly accept as satisfactory the relation of man and woman as master and slave, were for long ages powerless to affect the realities of life. The hour had to come as well as the man: and till the hour was favourable the most conclusive arguments, the most patent facts, fell on deaf ears and on blind eyes, and had no practical result in modifying the conduct of men and women, or in ameliorating the laws and customs concerning their relation to one another.
It was Mary Wollstonecraft's good fortune that when she spoke the ears of men had been prepared to hear and their minds to assimilate what she had to say. In one sense she was as much the product of the women's rights movement as its earliest confessor. The fermentation in men's minds which had already produced new thoughts about the rights of man, which was destined presently to overthrow the authority of unrestrained despotism wherever it existed in Western Europe, did not pass by without producing its effect on the greatest despotism of all, that of men over women. The idea that women are created simply to be ministers to the amusement,
