pause a while, as by a sign-post set up to tell the way-farer the road he has come and whither it leads. The torrent rushes unhindered from the steep mountain heights to the valley beneath-who may stem its course? A great movement spreads ever wider and wider-who shall bid it stop? It is beyond the power of the individual. Perhaps some great event of universal import may bring about a truce, perhaps the coming century may bring its solution to the much-vexed question, perhaps women themselves, warned by hard-won experience, may be willing to desist from wresting those rights which, while they hold out to them freedom and independence, turn them from what ensures not only their own happiness and well-being, but also from that upon which the welfare of the whole

human race is grounded. To point this out is the object of this treatise..

The emancipation of women, their deliverance from early prejudices and unnatural trammels, was a necessity which the development of culture and the altered condition of industrial relations was bound, by degrees, to bring about. The progress resulting from it, conducing to the wellbeing of thousands, cannot be denied, and demands the fullest recognition. It has opened up new possibilities of employment to women, and by thus relieving them from the burden of empty conventional prejudices, has given work to thousands of willing hands, and afforded scope for much latent intellectual power. Work, which in former times was looked upon as a degradation to ladies of position, is

now elevated to a moral power, and the gentlewoman in reduced circumstances no longer needs to earn her living with tears of humiliation and in secret. Openly she

shows the world that she intends to turn her abilities to good account, and no one dreams of withholding from her the right. The independent callings which have been opened up to women of late shelters them from the humiliation of seeking dependent positions among their more wealthy relatives, or from being forced, for the sake of a home, to the necessity of marrying against their inclinations. So far the emancipation of women has tended to the culture and ennobling of the sex, and must serve to keep it from some errors, and from the consciousness of empty, vapid lives. True, in all ages, there have been remarkable

women who have endeavoured to force the narrow limits of social opinion, but it has remained to the 19th century to bring about the great reformation in the position of women.

The position of its women is the test of a nation's culture. Among all uncivilised races the woman is looked upon as a beast of burden. The Zulu Kaffir only works until he can buy himself a cow and a wife, then they must work for him. The right over the life and death of the wife belongs in most savage races to the husband, who uses his power, as a rule, most arbitrarily. In ancient times the wife was either subject to, or the slave of, her husband. most cultured of had no "position."

Among the Greeks, the

all races, the woman

Shut out from public

life, her place was in her home, and her function in the education of her children -of her boys up to a certain age only. In spite of this we find a considerable number of learned women and philosophers among them, who, with but few exceptions, were reckoned as aliens. Nor was there wanting, from time to time, an endeavour to rouse woman from her intellectual apathy. Aspasia, the gifted wife of Pericles, essayed to exert her influence upon the women of Athens; Plutarch wrote that 66 women must also receive culture;" Aristotle advocated equal rights in wedlock; and Plato even in his day brought forward the question of Women's Rights. "Many women," said he, "are better calculated for certain things than many men, nor is there any depart