she says, "a right always includes a duty," and again, "rights and duties are inseparable."
The remarkable degree in which she was ahead of her time is shown on almost every page of "The Vindication." She claims for women the right to share in the advantages of representation in Parliament, nearly seventy years before Women's Suffrage was heard of in the House of Commons. She knows that few, if any, at that time would be found to sympathise with her, but that does not prevent her from claiming for women what she felt was simple justice. She also perceives the enormous importance of the economic independence of women, and its bearing on social health and disease. The possibility of women earning a comfortable livelihood by honest labour tends in some degree to prevent them from marrying merely for a living, and on the other hand cuts at one fruitful source of prostitution. She pointed out fifty years before any English woman had become a qualified medical practitioner that the profession of medicine was particularly well suited to women, and entirely congenial to the womanly character; and she argued that there were a number of other businesses and professions in which women might suitably and honourably engage. These opinions have now become the commonplaces of ordinary conversation; but it must not be forgotten, in estimating the originality of her mind, that she was writing only a very few years after the time when the great lion of the literary and social world of London had condemned even the harmless wield-
