oppression. Her heart bled for all, but most for the longest
suffering; and she was struck senseless to the ground by the news of
the execution of the "twenty-one," the brave Girondins. Would that
another woman, even greater than herself, had been untrammelled by her
sex, and could have wielded at first hand the power she had to
exercise through others; and might not France have been thus again
saved by a Joan of Arc--not only France, but the Revolution in all its
purity of idea, not in its horror.

In France, too, the women's question had been mooted; Condorcet having
written that one of the greatest steps of progress of the human
intellect would be the freedom from prejudice that would give equality
of right to both sexes: and the _Requete des Dames a l'Assemblee
Nationale_ 1791, was made simultaneously with the appearance of
Mary Wollstonecraft's _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_. These
were strong reasons to attract Mary to France, strange as the time was
for such a journey; but even then her book was translated and read
both in France and Germany. So here was Mary settled for a time, the
English scarcely having realised the turmoil that existed. She arrived
just before the execution of Louis XVI., and with a few friends was
able to study the spirit of the time, and begin a work on the subject,
which, unfortunately, never reached more than its first volume. Her
account, in a letter to Mr. Johnson, shows how acutely she felt in her
solitude on the day of the King's execution; how, for the first time
in her life, at night she dared not extinguish her candle. In fact,
the faculty of feeling for others so acutely as to gain courage to
uphold reform, does not necessarily evince a lack of sensitiveness on
the part of the individual, as seems often to be supposed, but the
very reverse. We can well imagine how Mary felt the need of sympathy
and support, separated as she was from her friends and from her