sexes, they ought to be educated together," and she proposes a detailed scheme of co-education, for which I must refer the curious to her own pages. It must here suffice to quote her emphatic words: "Mankind should be all educated after the same model, and the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfil the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become free, by being able to earn their own subsistence independent of men, in the same manner as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriage will never be held sacred until women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses." She further assures us that "were girls and boys permitted to pursue the same studies together, those graceful decencies might early be inculcated which produce modesty, without those sexual distinctions which taint the mind. Besides, this would be a sure way to promote carly marriages, and from carly marriages the most salutary physical and moral effects naturally flow." So much touching women's education. As to their social position-their "situation" Miss Wollstonecraft calls it-she insists on their admission to all, or well nigh all, the callings and occupations of men; and contends that "they ought to have representatives instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." She pleads, VI.] "THE COMMON LAW OF GRAVITATION.” 159 "Let there be no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravitation prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places." By these reforms Miss Wollstonecraft proposed to put an end to "the sexual weakness which makes women depend upon men for a subsistence, producing a kind of cattish affection which leads a wife to purr about her husband, as she would about any man who fed and caressed her." And among other happy results, she expects that "the father of a family will not then weaken his constitution and debase his sentiments by visiting the harlot, nor forget, in obeying the call of appetite, the purpose for which it was implanted. And the mother will not neglect her children to practise the arts of coquetry, when sense and modesty secure her the friendship of her husband." Two years after the Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written, Miss Wollstonecraft gave practical proof of her determination not to submit to "the coercion established in society," and— "the common law of gravitation prevailing," as I suppose-became the mistress of a vulgar American adventurer, called Imlay, whom she met in Paris, and of whom she was violently enamoured, as her letters to him sufficiently prove. "So Philcmedé lecturing all mankind On the soft passion and the taste refined, The event justified her prophetic soul in its aversion to pretty women. The charms of her "rational conversation" and "the sublime emo tions" inspired by her "intellectual beauty' appear to have been powerless against the fascinations of a young lady of the corps de ballet, for whom her paramour quitted her after the birth of her child. She did her best to win him back, and even went so far as to propose to share his home. with a new mistress-the successor of the ballet girl-an arrangement which Imlay prudently declined. After an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, she consoled herself with William Godwin, and lived with him for some months in illicit intercourse. Then he married her, somewhat against his will, in order to legitimate the child whose birth she was expecting, and in giving birth to which she died. Miss Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman made a certain stir in England when it was first published, and was translate into French and German. But the book was soon forgotten, and the Woman's Question may be said to have slumbered for seventy years, when it was again brought forward by a thinker of a very different calibre. In 1869 the late Mr. John Stuart Mill published his Essay on the Subjection of Women, a work which revivified the Woman's Rights move VI.] MR. MILL'S THESIS. 161 ment and er.titles him to the distinction - whatever that - may be worth of being considered its second. founder. Both from a literary and a logical point of view, this essay appears to me one of the least good things which proceeded from Mr. Mill's accomplished pen. Like everything which he wrote, it bears upon every page evidence of his love of righteousness and hatred of iniquity, of the hardness of his head and the tenderness of his heart. But no man of the world, I think, can read it and not feel how little the writer was in touch with actual life; much less, indeed, than Miss Wollstonecraft. That prig in petticoats was, at all events, a thorough woman in her instincts and passions, as her personal history sufficiently proves. A Puritan in his habits-however far removed from the religious beliefs of Puritanism-Mr. Mill knew nothing of the sex whose cause he undertook to plead, save what he may have learnt from the lady whom he eventually married. In "that incomparable friend," as he delighted to call her, who seems to have been to him pretty much what Madame de, Vaux was to Comte, he supposed himself to have round the perfect type of womanhood. A wider experience would probably have disabused him. However that may be, Mr. Mill's general thesis is that "the principle which regulates the existing relations between the two sexes-the legal subordination of the one to the other-is wrong in itself, and one of the chief hindrances to human M "The improvement," and that it ought to be replaced "by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, and no disability on the other." The present condition of women, he asserts roundly, "is the primitive state of slavery lasting on through successive mitigations and modifications," but still retaining "the taint of its brutal origin." The existing relations of the sexes he considers to be "grounded on force, not on justice." He does not, indeed, go so far as Miss Wollstonecraft, who declares that "man impedes the improvement of woman merely to gratify his sensual appetite." But he clearly does regard man as a strong, unscrupulous tyrant, holding the weaker vessel in unworthy subjection. generality of the male sex," he writes, he writes, "cannot yet tolerate the notion of living with an equal.” He admits, indeed, with his customary candour, that "numbers of married people-in the higher classes in England probably a great majority-do live in the spirit of a just law of equality." But he alleges that this is rather the exception than the rule in the lower classes. He urges that the legal state of woman, both in respect of her own person, her children, and her property, is far from satisfactory. He would facilitate divorce and judicial separation, would make of marriage "an equal contract, not implying the virtue of obedience," and would freely admit women to "all the functions and occupations hitherto regarded as the |