Women and Politics | Page 2

passionate loyalty with which Elizabeth was regarded, at
least during the latter part of her reign, scattered to the winds all John
Knox's 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),