in every line of the numerous passages in "The Vindication," where she contends that the subjection of women is inimical to domestic happiness, and appeals to men to "be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience." If this were so, "they would find us," she adds, more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens." The relation of Milton to his daughters may be mentioned as an object lesson in the truth of Mary Wollstonecraft's contention. He tyrannised over them, they deceived and cheated him, and the domestic life of one of the greatest of Englishmen, instead of being full of beauty and a source of strength to those who come after him, is a thing that we try not to think of, and can never remember without a sense of pain and loss.
Mary Wollstonecraft, as Mr. Kegan Paul says in his sketch of her life and work prefixed to her Letters to Imlay, makes, in her "Vindication of the Rights of Women," a reiterated claim that women should be treated as the friends and equals of men, and not as their toys and slaves; but she does not claim for women intellectual or physical or moral equality with men. Her argument is that being weaker than men, physically and mentally, and not superior morally, the way in which women are brought up, and their subordination throughout life, first to their fathers, then to their husbands, prevents the due natural development of their physical, mental, and moral capacities. How can the powers of the body be developed without
