measure meted out by the world to the partners in each other's degradation Mary Wollstonecraft perceives a fruitful source of immorality. The two sexes must in this, as in nearly every other respect, rise or sink together. Unchastity in men means unchastity in women; and the cure for the ills which unchastity brings with it is not to be found in penitentiaries and in Magdalen institutions, but in a truer measure of justice as regards the responsibilities of both sexes, in opening to women a variety of honourable means of earning a living, and in developing in men and women self-government and a sense of their responsibility to each other, themselves, their children, and the nation.
In many respects Mary Wollstonecraft's book gives us a pleasing assurance that with all the faults of our time we have made way upon the whole, and are several steps higher up on the ladder of decency and self-control than our forerunners were a hundred years ago. She speaks of the almost universal habit in her time among the wealthier classes of drinking to excess, and of what is even less familiar to her readers of the present day, "of a degree of gluttony which is so beastly" as to destroy all sense of seemliness. She also states that so far from chastity being held in honour among men, it was positively despised by them.
In all these matters the beginning of the twentieth century compares favourably with the end of the eighteenth; and one great factor in the progress made is the far greater concession of women's rights at this time compared with that. The development
