of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the
liberty of the other individuals with whom he is united in social
compact." Burke asserts that the present rights of man cannot be decided
by reason alone, since they are founded on laws and customs long
established. But Mary asks, How far back are we to go to discover their
first foundation? Is it in England to the reign of Richard II., whose
incapacity rendered him a mere cipher in the hands of the Barons; or to
that of Edward III., whose need for money forced him to concede certain
privileges to the commons? Is social slavery to be encouraged because it
was established in semi-barbarous days? Does Burke, she continues,--

"... recommend night as the fittest time to analyze a ray of light?

"Are we to seek for the rights of men in the ages when a few marks
were the only penalty imposed for the life of a man, and death for
death when the property of the rich was touched?--when--I blush to
discover the depravity of our nature--a deer was killed! Are these
the laws that it is natural to love, and sacrilegious to invade?
Were the rights of men understood when the law authorized or
tolerated murder?--or is power and right the same?"

Burke's contempt for the poor, which Mary thought the most conspicuous
feature of his treatise, was the chief cause of her indignation. She
could not endure silently his admonitions to the laboring class to
respect the property which they could not possess, and his exhortations
to them to find their consolation for ill-rewarded labor in the "final
proportions of eternal justice." "It is, sir, possible," she tells him
with some dignity, "to render the poor happier in this world, without
depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in
the next." To her mind, the oppression which the lower classes had
endured for ages, until they had become in the end beings scarcely above
the brutes, made the losses of the French nobility and clergy seem by
comparison very insignificant evils. The horrors of the 6th of October,
the discomforts and degradation of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and
the destitution to which many French refugees had been reduced, blinded
Burke to the long-suffering of the multitude which now rendered the
distress of the few imperative. But Mary's feelings were all stirred in
the opposite cause.

"What," she asks in righteous indignation,--"what were the