ing Greek and Latin verses. That the comparative absence of works of creative 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 labored, 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 licentiousness 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 action 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 must always be stronger than the person under his protection. A mother is overwhelmingly superior in strength to her infant child, and the child is completely at her mercy. The very highest conception that humanity has ever formed, whether it be founded in reality or not, is that of power losing itself in affection. This may be said without lapsing into what has been called the religion of inhumanity. St. Paul (who on any hypothesis is an authoritative expositor of the morality which became that of Christendom) preaches fraternity plainly and even passionately enough. He affirms with the utmost breadth the essential equality of the sexes, and their necessary relations to each other as the two halves of humanity. Yet he no less distinctly ratifies the unity of the family, the authority of its head, and the female need of personal government; a need which, when it is natural, has nothing in it more degrading than the need of protection.
The "Revolt of Woman" is the name given to the movement by a female writer in America, who, by-the-way, claims, in virtue of "superior complexity of organization," not only political equality, but absolute supremacy over man. But, in this revolt, to what do the insurgents appeal? To their own strength, or to the justice and affection of man?
The main factors of the relation between the sexes have hitherto been, and probably still are, natural affection—the man's need of a
