women with men. I think it will be admitted that the articulate objects of Modern Feminism, taking them one with another, rest on this dogma, and on this dogma alone. I know it has been argued as regards the question of suffrage, that the demand does not rest solely upon the admission of equality of capacity, since men of a notoriously inferior mental order are not excluded from voting upon that ground, but the fallacy of this last argument is obvious. In all these matters we have to deal with averages. Public opinion has hitherto recognised the average of women as being intellectually below the voting standard, and the average man as not. This, if admitted, is enough to establish the anti-suffrage thesis. The latter is not affected by the fact that it is possible to find certain individual men of inferior intelligence and therefore less intrinsically qualified to form a political judgment than certain specially gifted women. The pretended absurdity of “George Eliot having no vote, and of her gardener having one” is really no absurdity at all. In the first place, given the economic advantages which conferred education upon the novelist, and not upon the gardener, there is not sufficient evidence available that his judgment in public affairs might not have been even superior to that of George Eliot herself. Moreover, the possession of exceptionally strong imaginative faculty, expressing itself as literary
