are sufficient to show that she consented to be the champion of liberty in other countries only while they regarded England as the natural home of Freedom. Burke had no more faithful follower among his conservative friends than the reformer Hannah More.
After the outbreak of the Revolution she soon altered her opinion that, although the capture of the Bastille had been undertaken by "lawless rabble" yet "some good" might be expected from it. Price's sermon filled her with horror, and Burke's Reflections had her undivided sympathy. While engaged upon religious tracts and plans for instructing the children of the poor came the news of Dupont's speech in the National Assembly, attacking all religion and calling Nature and Reason the gods of men. Indignation made Hannah take up her pen in reply, and refute the atheistic arguments in a pamphlet. The success of this effort caused her to be solicited from all sides to undertake the refutation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Her humorous treatment of the subject in this second tract, entitled "Village Politics, by Will Chip", appealed to the class for whom it was chiefly intended and was a distinct success, as were her doggerel ballads on the subject, some of which were to popular tunes, preaching submission to the existing social order, for, as "Will Chip" puts it in his "true Rights of Man":
That some must be poorer, this truth will I sing,
Is the law of my Maker, and not of my king;
And the true Rights of Man, and the life of his cause,
Is not equal possessions; but equal, just laws.
Hannah's sympathy went out to patient Joe, the Newcastle collier, who held that "all things which happened were best", and to the ploughman who felt safe in his cottage with the British laws for his guard: "If the Squire should oppress, I get instant redress"; a view which the author of Caleb Williams emphatically did not share, and which makes the modern reader feel as if Hannah More were "laying it on a little too thick."
Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft—who, as will be seen in the next chapter, ranged herself among the opponents of Burke—thus took opposite sides in the great struggle, defending diametrically opposed principles, yet collaborating in gradually weaning the reading public from the conventional notion that the domain of literature was taboo to women and in accustoming them to the unwonted spectacle of women participating in a social struggle.
Mary Wollstonecraft's claims for a complete emancipation impressed Hannah More as directed straight against the divine authority. The state of inequality, we have seen, was looked upon by her as God's will, and to rebel against it was to oppose the decrees of the Almighty. The right way to benefit her sex seemed to her to insist on a better moral education. On this subject at least the two political adversaries were agreed. "In those countries in which fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the highest excess, they are slaves; their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to their charms" is one of the many statements in Hannah More's "Strictures on Female Education"[33] which Mary Wollstonecraft might have written, and both saw in a liberal moral education the only remedy. At this point, however, the two paths become separated. To Mary Wollstonecraft female education was merely one of the milestones in the march towards perfection; to Hannah More it seemed that women might be made instrumental "to raise the depressed tone of public morals and to awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle", and also that they might be called upon "to come forward and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country." With Hannah More, high morality and patriotism necessarily went hand in hand. Her ideal was to see all English women join in a thorough reform of manners and morals, that her country might become not only the bulwark of tradition against the mania for innovation, but also that of the religion she held sacred against the onslaughts of atheism coming from across the Channel.
If she had a less fervent temperament than Mary, she compensated for this lack through her practical insight, which told her that sudden radical changes are apt to destroy the edifice of ages, without offering anything solid as a substitute. She felt the guardian of her sex against the attacks of infidelity which in her eyes were principally directed against the female heart. "Conscious of the influence of women in civil society, conscious of the effect which female infidelity produced in France, they attribute the ill success of their attempts in this country to their having been hitherto chiefly addressed to the male sex. They are now sedulously labouring to destroy the religious principles of women, and in too many instances have fatally succeeded. For this purpose not only novels and romances have been made the vehicles of vice and infidelity, but the same allurement has been held out to the women of our country which was employed in the Garden of Eden by the first philosophist to the first sinner,—knowledge"[34].