not accustomed to the philosophical analysis of facts—which argues that the conspicuous absence of women in the field of intellectual work is due to the artificial restraints imposed upon them by all the traditional forms of education; that if we could suddenly make a leap of progress in this respect, and allow women everywhere to compete on fair and equal terms with men, then, under these altered circumstances of social life, women would prove themselves the intellectual compeers of man.
But the answer to this argument is almost painfully obvious. Although it is usually a matter of much difficulty to distinguish between nature and nurture, or between the results of inborn faculty and those of acquired knowledge, in the present instance no such difficulty obtains. Without again recurring to the anatomical and physiological considerations which bar a priori any argument for the natural equality of the sexes, and without remarking that the human female would but illustrate her own deficiency of rational development by supposing that any exception to the general laws of evolution can have been made in her favor—without dwelling on any such antecedent considerations, it is enough to repeat that in many departments of intellectual work the field has been open, and equally open, to both sexes. If to this it is answered that the traditional usages of education lead to a higher average of culture among men, thus furnishing them with a better vantage-ground for the origin of individual genius, we have only to add that the strong passion of genius is not to be restrained, by any such minor accidents of environment. Women by tens of thousands have enjoyed better educational as well as better social advantages than a Burns, a Keats, or a Faraday; and yet we have neither heard their voices nor seen their work.
If, again, to this it be rejoined that the female mind has been unjustly dealt with in the past, and can not now be expected all at once to throw off the accumulated disabilities of ages—that the long course of shameful neglect to which the selfishness of man has subjected the culture of woman, has necessarily left its mark upon the hereditary constitution of her mind—if this consideration be adduced, it obviously does not tend to prove the equality of the sexes; it merely accentuates the fact of inequality by indicating one of its causes. The treatment of women in the past may have been very wrong, very shameful, and very much to be regretted by the present advocates of women's rights; but proof of the ethical quality of this fact does not get rid of the fact itself, any more than a proof of the criminal nature of assassination can avail to restore to life a murdered man. We must look the facts in the face. How long it may take the woman of the future to recover the ground which has been lost in the psychological race by the woman of the past, it is impossible to say; but we may predict with confidence that, even under the most favorable conditions as to culture, and even supposing the mind of man to remain stationary (and
