readily becomes a danger to ends that are very vital. Under self-guidance individuals will diverge widely, and some of their eccentricities will be futile, others wasteful, others even painful and abhorrent to witness. But, upon the whole, it is good that they should differ. Individuality is an element of well-being, and that not only because it is the necessary consequence of self-government, but because, after all allowances for waste, the common life is fuller and richer for the multiplicity of types that it includes, and that go to enlarge the area of collective experience. The larger wrong done by the repression of women is not the loss to women themselves who constitute one half of the community, but the impoverishment of the community as a whole, the loss of all the elements in the common stock which the free play of the woman’s mind would contribute.
Similar principles underlie Mill’s treatment of representative government. If the adult citizen, male or female, has a right to vote, it is not so much as a means to the enforcement of his claims upon society, but rather as a means of enforcing his personal responsibility for the actions of the community. The problem
