The opening of the nineteenth century was signalised by the cessation of the Napoleonic wars; and the Peace brought wider opportunities of leisure, learning, and literature to both sexes. Yet so powerful had become the force of Custom in confusing men’s ideas of Justice, that even James Mill, the pupil of Jeremy Bentham, in his masterly article on “Government” for the Supplement to the “Cyclopædia Britannica” (afterwards republished in pamphlet form, 1825) could allow it to blind his eyes to the logical results of his own reasoning. In page 494 he says, “That one human being will desire to render the person and property of another subservient to his pleasures, notwithstanding the pain or loss of pleasure which it may occasion to that other individual, _is the foundation of government_. The desire of the object implies the desire of the power necessary to accomplish the object. The desire, therefore, of that power which is necessary to render the persons and properties of other human beings subservient to our pleasures, is a grand governing law of human nature.” Yet the writer of this searching analysis of the cause and need of government says elsewhere (p. 300), “One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those of other individuals, may be struck off from political rights without inconvenience. In this light may be viewed all children up to a certain age, whose interests are involved in those of their parents. In this light, also, women may be regarded, the interest of _almost all of whom_ is involved in either that of their fathers or that of their husbands.” Yet even at that early date a man, inspired by a woman, rose up to protest against this sweeping assertion. William Thompson, in 1825, published a little book, dedicated to Mrs. Wheeler, that puts the whole question in a broad modern light, “_The Appeal_ of one Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, to retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. In reply to a paragraph of Mr. Mill’s celebrated article on Government.” This interesting book was the first voice of a nineteenth century man against the degradation of women. He points out that Mill has not nearly reached the level of his master, Bentham, in his conception. He asks, what is to become of those not included in the “nearly all”? what of those that are? “Why are women’s interests included in those of men? Mr. Mill’s article seeks to evade the equal claims of the other half of the human race to similar protection against the abuse of the same power, against the application of the general principle of security to women.” “In order to include women in the proscription of children, a fiction must be manufactured, as none of the good reasons applicable to children would be found to apply to women, and this romance of an identity of interest is the ingenious, say rather, the vulgar, the audacious fiction devised” (p.