et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute
Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin;" and with her came Margaret Boufflet
and a host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft,
whose famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative
now; and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker,
Cotton Mather's grandchild, who, in 1848, published the first book on the
"Rights of Woman" ever written on this side the Atlantic.

Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo these
appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the excellence of
woman and her preëminence over man, down to the first youthful thesis of
Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior," there has been a succession of
voices crying in the wilderness. In England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book,
in 1599, called "A Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the
World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all
Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, _Interlarded with
Poetry_." _Per contra_, the learned Acidalius published a book in Latin,
and afterwards in French, to prove that women are not reasonable creatures.
Modern theologians are at worst merely sub-acid, and do not always say so,
if they think so. Meanwhile most persons have been content to leave the
world to go on its old course, in this matter as in others, and have thus
acquiesced in that stern judicial decree with which Timon of Athens sums up
all his curses upon womankind,--"If there sit twelve women at the table,
let a dozen of them be--as they are."

Ancient or modern, nothing in any of these discussions is so valuable as
the fact of the discussion itself. There is no discussion where there is no
wrong. Nothing so indicates wrong as this morbid self-inspection. The
complaints are a perpetual protest, the defences a perpetual confession. It
is too late to ignore the question; and, once opened, it can be settled