Little direct encouragement was given to women by the revolutionaries. A few men like Sieyès and Condorcet, who had founded a Lyceum for women in 1786, recognised that women were human beings when they spoke of "the Rights of Man." The majority, led by Mirabeau, and afterwards by Danton, refused to listen to the appeal of women like Mme. Condorcet; even revolutionary women like Mme. Roland agreed with them. Hence the share that women took in the Revolution cannot occupy a place of any prominence in such a study as this. Their campaign for the recognition of their rights came to naught. They showered petitions on the National Assembly, founded political clubs all over the country, and published a journal, _L'Observateur féminin_. But the Jacobins were inexorable, and they guillotined the most fiery of their speakers, Olympe de Gouges (reputed daughter of Louis XIV.), for her fearless opposition. And, eventually, the three great waves washed over the work of the Revolution and obliterated its traces. The Directory suppressed Jacobinism, Napoleon superseded Directorism, and Metternich and Wellington annihilated Napoleonism. A group of statesmen, sitting round a table in the Foreign Office at Vienna, set up again the broken model of aristocratic Europe, and democracy was unceremoniously buried. But political evolution had set definitively in the direction of democracy, and in another generation it would rise again. With this development, which of itself sufficed to lay bare the foundations of political power and press forward the woman question, was associated an industrial development that made an equally fatal breach in the old order. How these and other far-reaching changes have irresistibly forced on us the feminist controversy of our time will be shown in the next chapter. CHAPTER VIII. THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN ancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals. A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.