ious, and highly intelligent woman,
and commanded the respect of those who knew her best. "To know her,"
says Godwin in his Memoirs, "was to love her, and those who did not love
her, did not know her."

Of course, she was an exceptional person, for have I not intimated that
she was a thinker? This was over a hundred years ago, and thinkers were
as scarce then as now, for even so-called educated folk, for the most
part, only think that they think. Frederic Harrison did not stray far
a-field when he referred to Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a reincarnation
of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft had translated Rousseau's "Emile" into English, and
had read Voltaire closely and with appreciation.

The momentous times of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two were on in Paris.
That mob of women, ragged and draggled, had tramped out to Versailles,
and Marie Antoinette, a foolish girl who rattled around in a place that
should have been occupied by a Queen, had looked out of the window and
propounded her immortal question, "What do they want?"

"Bread!" was the answer.

"Why don't they eat cake?" asked Her Chatterbox.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a revolutionary by nature. Looking about her she
saw London seething with swarms of humanity just one day's rations
removed from starvation. A few miles away she saw acres upon
acres--thousands of acres--kept and guarded for private parks and
game-preserves. Then it was that she supplied Henry George that fine
phrase, "Man is a land animal." And she fully comprehended that the
question of human rights will never be ended until we settle the land
question. She said: "Man is a land animal, and to deprive the many of
the right to till the soil is like depriving fishes of the right to swim
in the sea. You force fish into a net, and they cease to thrive; you
entrap men, through economic necessity, in cities, and allow a few to
control the land, and you perpetuate ignorance and crime. And eventually
you breed a race of beings who take no joy in Nature, never having
gotten acquainted with her. The problem is not one of religion, but of
commonsense in economics. Back to the land!" Of course a writing woman
who could think like this was deeply interested in the unrest across the
Channel.

And so Mary packed up and went over to Paris, lured by three things: a
curiosity concerning the great social experiment being there worked out;
an ambition to perfect herself in the French language by speaking on