While Mary Wollstonecraft in this manner advanced progressive ideas, she also discussed several questions, dangerous and explosive at that time. In regard to marriage she recommended emancipation from the coercions and ceremonies imposed upon all Christians by the Church. And where love had ceased, divorce should be made easy. These points, together with her extraordinary plainness of speech and her denial of the eternity of the torments of hell, caused an outcry of all classes, to whom the dust of tradition was sacred, or who saw their assumed authority endangered. The air grew thick with insults and insinuations, hurled at the champion of such principles by churchmen feeding on their worn-out thistle-creeds. There were also the shrill, polished shrieks of society, whose antiquated dogmas Mary Wollstonecraft had repudiated. But the impulse, given by her, did not die. It became the heritage of later and more advanced generations, who have tried to realize the ideas of this most remarkable woman of the 18th Century. [Illustration] WOMAN’S ENTRY INTO INDUSTRY. Since the stirring years of the American War of Independence and of the French Revolution the question of woman’s rights and woman suffrage has remained constantly before the public. Its significance greatly increased when with the invention of steam-engines, with the rapid growth and extension of trade and commerce, and with the introduction of modern methods all conditions of industrial life likewise became revolutionized. Many of those industries in which women participated, were transferred from the homes to factories, where the workmen and women were placed at machines, producing within one day greater quantities of goods than the laborers formerly had manufactured within weeks or months. With this industrial revolution came, however, also many evils. The laborers remained no longer masters of their own time and efforts. While hitherto they had been the owners of their little industry, now the factory owners and the great industries began to own them. They found themselves bound by strict rules, not of their own making, but prescribed and enforced by their employers, many of whom had not the slightest consideration for the people that worked for them. Just as soulless as their machines, and thinking only of gain, they abused their employees wherever possible, and in doing so often resorted to the meanest tricks. Nowhere did such evils become so appalling as in England, where the politicians subordinated all other considerations to industry. It was here that in order to reduce the small wages of the workman cheap woman- and child-labor was first introduced on a large scale, and feeble, defenseless creatures, without experience and organization, were subjected to the most cruel oppression and exploitation.