character is that it has _no sense of justice_. This is mainly due to
the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of
reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position
which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are
dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their
instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to
say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth,
and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish
with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her
defence and protection, with the arts of dissimulation; and all the
power which Nature has conferred upon man in the shape of physical
strength and reason, has been bestowed upon women in this form. Hence,
dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the
stupid as of the clever. It is as natural for them to make use of it
on every occasion as it is for those animals to employ their means of
defence when they are attacked; they have a feeling that in doing so
they are only within their rights. Therefore a woman who is perfectly
truthful and not given to dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility,
and for this very reason they are so quick at seeing through
dissimulation in others that it is not a wise thing to attempt it with
them. But this fundamental defect which I have stated, with all
that it entails, gives rise to falsity, faithlessness, treachery,
ingratitude, and so on. Perjury in a court of justice is more
often committed by women than by men. It may, indeed, be generally
questioned whether women ought to be sworn in at all. From time to
time one finds repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for
nothing, taking things from shop-counters when no one is looking, and
making off with them.

Nature has appointed that the propagation of the species shall be the