healthy. Women have used the greater freedom and the better education they have received since Mary Wollstonecraft's time just as she predicted they would. They care for their own children as much, and they care for other children more. They are not content with securing favourable conditions of life for their own children, but in almost innumerable ways are making efforts to check the waste in children's lives that went on unheeded in Mary Wollstonecraft's time.
The faults of "The Vindication" as a literary work are patent upon the face of it. There is a want of order and system in it which may, perhaps, be attributed to the desultory education of the writer. As she herself points out, the want of order in women's education is answerable to a large extent for the want of order in their after-work. A more important blemish to modern ears consists in the formal and frequently stilted language in which the writer conveys her meaning. The reaction against the formalities of the Johnsonian period had begun, but had not as yet conquered; the triumph of the naturalistic school in literature led by Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and Joanna Baillie was yet to come. There are other faults in the book deeper than those of order and style, which are probably to be traced to a reaction against the school of ethics, which proclaimed that appearances and decorum were ends in themselves to be diligently sought for. To this reaction may also, I believe, be attributed the errors of Mary Wollstonecraft's own life, and
