Before the close of the eighteenth century, however, =Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin blew a loud trumpet blast=, in her indignant “Vindication of the Rights of Women.” She treats the subject on lines that men and women are only now beginning to learn to read. “There can be no duty without reason. There can be no morality without equality. There can be no justice when its recipients are only of one sex. Let us first consider women in the broad light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed upon the earth to unfold their faculties.” “Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partakes with him the gift of reason? Do you not act a tyrant’s part when you force _all_ women by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families, groping in the dark? Surely you will not assert that a duty can be binding that is not founded on reason.” “Women may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading both the master and the abject dependent.” “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners, time to restore to women their lost dignity and to make them labour by reforming themselves, to reform the world.” She was too much in advance of her times to be successful in spreading her views, especially as they were entangled with other opinions even more unpopular in her day. Yet she sowed the seed that is still growing. The society she pictures gives a painful illustration of the effects of the exclusively masculine creeds of her century. Yet, during that dark age of women’s privilege, there were =some Legal Cases tried= and decided, refreshing in their results, as they showed that dispassionate judges could still do something for women, when they followed the ordinary principles of Philology, and decreed that a common term could stand for woman as well as for man, even when it meant a privilege. “A woman was appointed by the Justices to be a _governor_ of a workhouse at Chelmsford in Essex, and Mr. Parker moved to quash the order because it was an office not suitable to her sex, but the Justices upheld the appointment” (2 Lord Raymond, 1014). “My Lady Broughton was _keeper_ of the Gatehouse Prison” (3 Keble, 32). “A woman was appointed clerk in the King’s Bench” (_see_ Showers’ P.C.). A lady’s appointment to be _Commissioner_ of Sewers was also contested, but it was “decided that as the office by statute” shall be granted to such _person_ or persons as the said Lords should appoint, “the word _person_ stands indifferently for either sex ... and though women have been discreetly spared ... yet I am of opinion, for the authorities and reasons aforesaid, that this appointment is _warrantable in law_. Women have been secluded as unfit, but they are not in law to be excluded as incapable,” _i.e._, the election determined eligibility; and so the Countess of Warwick was allowed to retain the benefits of her election. (_See_ Callis. 250.)