I have already described the influences that had for centuries been undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it, at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published a _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ in the height of the French Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view. Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the enfranchisement of women.[12] By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely new complexion on the question of woman's position in the State. It will be convenient to note these tendencies here--warning the reader that they increase in later decades--in order to understand the real logical strength of the modern movement. The struggle is, in essence, a conflict of two ideals--the new ideal and the old belief, not so much that "woman's place is the home," but that she shall have no interest beyond it. How far men have a right to dictate their position to women, or how far one group of women have the faintest pretension to dictate to another group, I need not waste time in inquiring. I chance to be one of those males who have never discovered the slenderest moral or rational base for the assumed right to tell women what is best for them, and force them to do it. But I need not linger over this, as the old ideal was framed in harmony with a world that has passed away for ever, and it is as odd and discordant as any other medieval survival in our world.