ll a change of opinion, producing a
change of morals, render thee truly free? When will truth give life
to real magnanimity, and justice place equality on a stable seat?
When will thy sons trust, because they deserve to be trusted; and
private virtue become the guarantee of patriotism? Ah! when will
thy government become the most perfect, because thy citizens are
the most virtuous?"

The same impartiality is preserved in the relation of even the most
exciting and easily misconceived incidents of the Revolution. The
courageous and resolute resistance of the Third Estate to the clergy and
nobility is described with dignified praise which never descends into
fulsome flattery. The ignorance, vanity, jealousy, disingenuousness,
self-sufficiency, and interested motives of members of the National
Assembly are unhesitatingly exposed in recording such of their actions
as, examined superficially, might seem the outcome of a love of freedom.
In giving the details of the taking of the Bastille, and the women's
march on Versailles, Mary becomes really eloquent. Mr. Kegan Paul's
opinion may be here advantageously cited. "Her accounts of the Bastille
siege and of the Versailles episode," he says, "are worth reading beside
those of the master to whose style they are so great a contrast. Carlyle
has seized on the comic element in the march to Versailles, Mary
Wollstonecraft on the tragic; and hers seems to me the worthier view."

Many of the remarks upon civilization and the influence of the
cultivation of science on the understanding, with which the book is
interspersed, are full of wisdom and indicative of deep thought and
careful research. Hers was, to use with but slight change the words with
which she concludes, the philosophical eye, which, looking into the
nature and weighing the consequence of human actions, is able to discern
the cause which has produced so many dreadful effects.

Notwithstanding its excellence and the reputation it once had, this work
is now almost unknown. But few have ever heard of it, still fewer read
it; a fact due, of course, to its incompleteness. The first and only
volume ends with the departure of Louis from Versailles to Paris, when
the Revolution was as yet in its earliest stages. This must ever be a
matter of regret. That succeeding volumes, had she written them, would
have been even better is very probable. There was marked development in
her intellectual powers afte