The women allowed themselves to be silenced, and went away. There can be no doubt that the radical Chaumette voiced the innermost sentiments of most of our men, who otherwise abhor him. We also hold that it is a proper division of work to leave to men the defense of the country, and to women the care of the home and the hearth. In Russia, late in the fall of the year and after they have tended the fields, the men of whole village districts move to distant factories, and leave to the women the administration of the commune and the house. For the rest, the oratorical gush of Chaumette is mere phrases. What he says concerning the labors of the men in the fields is not even correct: since time immemorial down to to-day, woman's was not the easy part in agriculture. The alleged labors of the chase and the race course are no "labors" at all: they are amusements of men; and, as to politics, it has perils for him only who swims _against_ the stream, otherwise it offers the men at least as much amusement as labor. It is the egoism of man that speaks in that speech. At about the same time when the French Revolution was under way, and engaged the attention of all Europe, a woman rose on the other side of the Channel also, in England, to labor publicly in behalf of equal rights for her sex. She was Mary Wollstoncraft, born in 1759, and who, in 1790, published a book against Edmund Burke, the most violent enemy of the French Revolution. She later, 1792, wrote a second book--"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"--in which she took the stand for absolute equality of rights for her sex. In this book she demands the suffrage for women in the elections for the Lower House. But she met in England with even less response than did her sisters in France. Ridiculed and insulted by her contemporaries, she went under after trying ordeals. Before the Revolution it was the encyclopedist Condorcet who principally took the field for the equal rights of both sexes. To-day, matters lie somewhat differently. Since then, conditions have changed mightily,--the position of woman along with them. Whether married or unmarried, more than ever before woman now has a deep interest in social and political conditions. It can not be a matter of indifference to her whether the Government chains every year to the army hundreds of thousands of vigorous, healthy men; whether a policy is in force that favors wars, or does not; whether the necessaries of life are made dearer by taxes, that promote, besides, the adulteration of food, and are all the harder upon a family in the measure of its size, at a time, at that, in which the means of life are most stingily measured for the large majority. Moreover, woman pays direct and indirect taxes out of her support and her income. Again, the system of education is of highest interest to her: it goes far towards determining the position of her sex: as a mother, she has a double interest therein.