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But if there be no specific intellectual difference (as there is actually none), is there any practical and moral difference? I use the two epithets as synonymous; for practical power may exist without acuteness of intellect: but it cannot exist without sobriety, patience, and courage, and sundry other virtues, which are ‘moral’ in every sense of that word.

I know of no such difference. There are, doubtless, fields of political action more fitted for men than for women; but are there not again fields more fitted for women than for men?–fields in which certain women, at least, have already shown such practical capacity, that they have established not only their own right, but a general right for the able and educated of their sex, to advise officially about that which they themselves have unofficially mastered. Who will say that Mrs. Fry, or Miss Nightingale, or Miss Burdett Coutts, is not as fit to demand pledges of a candidate at the hustings on important social questions as any male elector; or to give her deliberate opinion thereon in either House of Parliament, as any average M.P. or peer of the realm? And if it be said that these are only brilliant exceptions, the rejoinder is, What proof have you of that? You cannot pronounce on the powers of the average till you have tried them. These exceptions rather prove the existence of unsuspected and unemployed strength below. If a few persons of genius, in any class, succeed in breaking through the barriers of routine and prejudice, their success shows that they have left behind them many more who would follow in their steps if those barriers were but removed. This has been the case in every forward movement, religious, scientific, or social. A daring spirit here and there has shown his fellow-men what could be known, what could be done; and behold, when once awakened to a sense of their own powers, multitudes have proved themselves as capable, though not as daring, as the leaders of their forlorn hope. Dozens of geologists can now work out problems which would have puzzled Hutton or Werner; dozens of surgeons can perform operations from which John Hunter would have shrunk appalled; and dozens of women, were they allowed, would, I believe, fulfil in political and official posts the hopes which Miss Wedgwood and Mr. Boyd Kinnear entertain.

But, after all, it is hard to say anything on this matter, which has not been said in other words by Mr. Mill himself, in pp. 98-104 of his ‘Subjection of Women;’ or give us more sound and palpable proof of women’s political capacity, than the paragraph with which he ends his argument:–

‘Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics are incapable of qualifying themselves for the less? Is there any reason, in the nature of things, that the wives and sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as competent as the princes themselves to their business, but that the wives and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of companies, and managers of public institutions, should be unable to do what is done by their brothers and husbands? The real reason is plain enough; it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality of men by their rank than placed below them by their sex, have never been taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with politics; but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural to any cultivated human being, in the great transactions which took place around them, and in which they might be called on to take a part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as men; and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be any inferiority. Exactly where and in proportion as women’s capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have they been found adequate.’