For the rest the oratorical effusion of Chaumette consists of mere phrases. It is not true that man has borne the burdens of agriculture. From primeval days down to the present woman has contributed a large share to agriculture. The exertions of the hunt and the races are no “exertions,” but a pleasure to men, and politics entails dangers only for those who combat current opinions, while to others it offers at least as much pleasure as exertion. Nothing but the egotism of man finds expression in this speech. Aims similar to those pursued by the Encyclopedists and the great revolution in France found expression in the United States, when, during the seventies and eighties of the eighteenth century, the colonists won their struggle for independence from England and established a democratic constitution. At that time, Mercy Ottis Warren and the wife of the second president of the United States, Mrs. Adams, together with a few other women, favored political equality. It was due to their influence that the State of New Jersey bestowed the right of suffrage upon women, of which it deprived them again in 1807. In France, even before the outbreak of the revolution, Condorcet, later a Girondist, published a brilliantly written essay in favor of woman’s suffrage and the political equality of both sexes. Inspired by the great events in the neighboring country, it was brave Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, who proclaimed woman’s cause at the other side of the channel. In 1790 she wrote a book in opposition to Burke, one of the most vehement opponents of the French Revolution, in which she defended the rights of man. Soon after she proceeded to demand the rights of man for her own sex. In her book, published in 1792, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” she severely criticised her own sex, but demanded and bravely defended complete equality for women in behalf of the common welfare. She met with vehement opposition and was subjected to severe and unjust attacks. Heart-broken by bitter inward struggles, she died in 1797, misunderstood and ridiculed by her contemporaries. At the same time, when the first serious endeavors to obtain political equality for women were being made in France, England, and the United States, even in Germany, which was particularly retrogressive then, a German writer--Th. G. v. Hippel--anonymously published a book in Berlin, in 1792, on the “Civic Improvement in the Condition of Women,” in which he defended the equal rights of women. At that time a book on the civic improvement in the condition of men would have been equally justified. We must therefore doubly admire the courage of this man, who, in his book, ventured to draw all the logical conclusions from social and political sex equality and defended same very ably and intelligently.