accepted by most of us, in our every-day life, as part of the natural order of things on which we can rely as implicitly as on the continuity of the forces of nature. Mary Wollstonecraft, however, finds great fault with women in her time, and roundly accuses them of cunning, superstition, want of generosity, low sense of justice, gross mismanagement of their children and of their households, and of a domestic selfishness which, in some respects, is worse than neglect. This last subject is worth referring to, because some of those who wish to maintain the subjection of women are to be found even now who argue that if a woman is happy in her own children she has no occasion to occupy herself at all with the circumstances that make or mar the lives of other children. On this point Mary Wollstonecraft says:—
"In short, speaking of the majority of mothers, they leave their children entirely to the care of servants; or, because they are their children, treat them as if they were little demi-gods, though I have always observed that the women who thus idolise their children seldom show common humanity to servants, or feel the least tenderness for any children but their own."
If this were true a hundred years ago the majority of candid observers certainly would not maintain that it is true now. From the time of Mrs. Fry downwards there has been a constantly growing army of women who both idolise their own children and spend themselves with unstinting devotion to render the lives of other children happy and
