as entirely appropriate to the standpoint of the present time.

Nothing that has been written or said, in later days, has made its
teaching superfluous. It demands all that is asked to-day for women, and
that on the broadest and most substantial ground. The usual arguments
against the emancipation of women from a position of political and
social inferiority are all carefully considered and carefully answered.
Much study is shown of the prominent women of history, and of the
condition of the sex at different periods. Much understanding also of
the ideal womanhood, which has always had its place in the van of human
progress, and of the actual womanhood, which has mostly been bred and
trained in an opposite direction.

We have, then, in the book, a thorough statement, both of the
shortcomings of women themselves, and of the wrongs which they in turn
suffer from society. The cause of the weak against the strong is
advanced with sound and rational argument. We will not say that a
thoughtful reader of to-day will indorse every word of this remarkable
treatise. Its fervor here and there runs into vague enthusiasm, and much
is asserted about souls and their future which thinkers of the present
day do not so confidently assume to know.

The extent of Margaret's reading is shown in her command of historical
and mythical illustration. Her beloved Greeks furnish her with some
portraits of ideal men in relation with ideal women. As becomes a
champion, she knows the friends and the enemies of the cause which she
makes her own. Here, for example, is a fine discrimination:--

"The spiritual tendency is toward the elevation of woman, but the
intellectual, by itself, is not so. Plato sometimes seems penetrated by
that high idea of love which considers man and woman as the twofold
expression of one thought. But then again Plato, the man of intellect,
treats woman in the republic as property, and in the "Timaeus" says that
man, if he misuse the privileges of one life, shall be degraded into the
form of a woman."

Margaret mentions among the women whom she considered helpers and
favorers of the new womanhood, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Jameson, and our own
Miss Sedgwick. Among the writers of the other sex, whose theories point
to the same end, she speaks of Swedenborg, Fourier, and Goethe. The
first-named comes to this through his mystical appreciation of spiritual
life; the second, by his systematic distribution of gifts and
opportunities a