Women and Politics | Page 2

arguments against the 'Regiment of Women;' and a literature sprang up in which woman was set forth no longer as the weakling and the temptress, but as the guide and the inspirer of man. Whatever traces of the old foul leaven may be found in Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, or Ben Jonson, such books as Sidney's 'Arcadia,' Lyly's 'Euphues,' Spenser's 'Fairy Queen,' and last, but not least, Shakespeare's Plays, place the conception of woman and of the rights of woman on a vantage-ground from which I believe it can never permanently fall again--at least until (which God forbid) true manhood has died out of England. To a boy whose notions of his duty to woman had been formed, not on Horace and Juvenal, but on Spenser and Shakespeare,--as I trust they will be some day in every public school,--Mr. John Stuart Mill's new book would seem little more than a text-book of truths which had been familiar and natural to him ever since he first stood by his mother's knee.
I say this not in depreciation of Mr. Mill's book. I mean it for the very highest praise. M. Agassiz says somewhere that every great scientific truth must go through three stages of public opinion. Men will say of it, first, that it is not true; next, that it is contrary to religion; and lastly, that every one knew it already. The last assertion of the three is often more than half true. In many cases every one ought to have known the truth already, if they had but used their common sense. The great antiquity of the earth is a case in point. Forty years ago it was still untrue; five-and-twenty years ago it was still contrary to religion. Now every child who uses his common sense can see, from looking at the rocks and stones about him, that the earth is many thousand, it may be many hundreds of thousands of years old; and there is no difficulty now in making him convince himself, by his own eyes and his own reason, of the most prodigious facts of the glacial epoch.
And so it ought to be with the truths which Mr. Mill has set forth. If the minds of lads can but be kept clear of Pagan brutalities and mediaeval superstitions, and fed instead on the soundest and noblest of our English literature, Mr. Mill's creed about women will, I verily believe, seem to them as one which they have always held by instinct; as a natural deduction from their own intercourse with their mothers, their aunts, their sisters: and thus Mr. Mill's book may achieve the highest triumph of which such a book is capable; namely--that years hence young men will not care to read it, because they take it all for granted.
There are those who for years past have held opinions concerning women identical with those of Mr. Mill. They thought it best, however, to keep them to themselves; trusting to the truth of the old saying, 'Run not round after the world. If you stand still long enough, the world will come round to you.' And the world seems now to be coming round very fast towards their standing-point; and that not from theory, but from experience. As to the intellectual capacity of girls when competing with boys (and I may add as to the prudence of educating boys and girls together), the experience of those who for twenty years past have kept up mixed schools, in which the farmer's daughter has sat on the same bench with the labourer's son, has been corroborated by all who have tried mixed classes, or have, like the Cambridge local examiners, applied to the powers of girls the same tests as they applied to boys; and still more strikingly by the results of admitting women to the Royal College of Science in Ireland, where young ladies have repeatedly carried off prizes for scientific knowledge against young men who have proved themselves, by subsequent success in life, to have been formidable rivals. On every side the conviction seems growing (a conviction which any man might have arrived at for himself long ago, if he would have taken the trouble to compare the powers of his own daughters with those of his sons), that there is no difference in kind, and probably none in degree, between the intellect of a woman and that of a man; and those who will not as yet assent to this are growing more willing to allow fresh experiments on the question, and to confess that, after all (as Mr. Fitch well says in his report to the Schools Inquiry Commission), 'The true measure of a woman's right to knowledge is her capacity for receiving it, and not any theories of ours as to what she