helpmate and the complement, should become, as the leaders in the Woman's Right movement in the United States evidently desire, the rival and competitor of man. Both she cannot be; and it is by no means clear that, in deciding which she shall be, the aspirations of the leaders of this movement coincide with the interests of the sex.
If the education of women has hitherto been defective, so has that of men. We are now going to do our best to improve both. Surely no accomplishment to the acquisition of which woman has been condemned to spend her time, could well be less useful than that of writing Greek or Latin verses. That the comparative absence of works of created genius among women is due entirely to the social tyranny which has excluded, or is supposed to have excluded, them from literary and scientific careers, cannot be said to be self-evident. The case of music, often cited, seems to suggest that there is another cause, and that the career of intellectual ambition is in most cases not likely to be happier than that of domestic affection, though this is no reason why the experiment should not be fairly tried. Perhaps the intellectual disabilities under which women have laboured, even in the past, have been somewhat exaggerated. If Shelley was a child to Mrs. Mill, as Mr. Mill says, no "social disabilities" hindered Mrs. Mill from publishing poems which would have eclipsed Shelley. The writer once heard an American lecturer of great eminence confidently ascribe the licenciousness of English fiction in the early part of the last century to the exclusion of women from literary life. The lecturer forgot that the most popular novelist of that period, and certainly not the least licentious, was Mrs. Aphra Behn. And this lady's name suggests the remark that as the relations of the sexes have been the most intimate conceivable, the influence of character has been reciprocal, and the level of moral ideas and sentiments for both pretty much the same.
Mr. Mill, seeing that the man is the stronger, seems to assume that the relations between man and woman must always have been regulated simply by the law of the strongest. But strength is not tyranny. The protector
