It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess, Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew larger and larger--all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton's _History_. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle. In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000 to sing "Hail, dawn of liberty," and threaten to march on London, now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (_Essay on Government_) that women's interests were bound up with men's, and so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who would not do these things, how _they_ were to be represented. The Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in 1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the Municipal Corporations' Act.