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forming a trustworthy opinion. They are, moreover, absolutely irrelevant to the practical controversy, which should be decided, as Mr. Smith himself in his essay confesses, "on its merits," "the interest of the whole community" being the test, and not by what people may think as to the life and opinions of any individual, however eminent. Further, their discussion cannot but inflict the keenest pain on more than one living person, who, from the nature of the case, are precluded from defending those whom they hold dear. To employ such arguments, therefore, is to use poisoned shafts; and I should have thought that Mr. Goldwin Smith would be about the last man living to resort to such modes of warfare.
Nor is this the only topic introduced by Mr. Smith into this discussion, which might, if not with advantage, at least without detriment to his argument, have been omitted. In his criticism of Mr. Mill's view of the historical origin of the present disabilities of women, there is much the connection of which with the practical question now before the English public it is not very easy to discern. When indeed Mr. Mill first took the question up, the discussion of this aspect of the case was imperatively demanded; because the thing then to be done was, not simply to find arguments to prove the expediency of admitting women to the suffrage, but first of all, and most difficult of all, to gain a hearing for his cause—to make some impression on the solid mass of prejudice that was arrayed against any consideration of the subject; and this could only be done by showing the factitious nature of the existing relation of the sexes. Accordingly, Mr. Mill addressed himself to this task, and in his work on the 'Subjection of Women,' deduced their disabilities from that primitive condition of the human race in which man employed his superior physical strength to coerce woman to his will. Such being the origin of the subjection of women, the disabilities complained of Mr. Mill regarded as, in ethnological phrase, "survivals" from a state of society in which physical force was supreme. To this explanation Mr.
