supposing that the tailor or shoemaker needs less intellect in his calling
than the soldier or prize-fighter, so there is nothing to suggest that, in
the past, woman has not expended as much pure intellect in the mass of her
callings as the man in his; while in those highly specialised intellectual
occupations, in which long and uninterrupted training tending to one point
is necessary, such as the liberal professions and arts, that, although
woman has practically been excluded from the requisite training, and the
freedom to place herself in the positions in which they can be pursued,
that yet, by force of innate genius and gifts in such directions, she has
continually broken through the seemingly insuperable obstacles, and again
and again taken her place beside man in those fields of labour; showing
thereby not merely aptitude but passionate and determined inclination in
those directions. With equal truth, it is often remarked that, when as an
independent hereditary sovereign, woman has been placed in the only
position in which she has ever been able freely and fully to express her
own individuality, and though selected at random by fate from the mass of
women, by the mere accident of birth or marriage, she has shown in a large
percentage of cases that the female has the power to command, organise, and
succeed in one of the most exacting and complex of human employments, the
government of nations; that from the days of Amalasontha to Isabella of
Spain, Elizabeth of England, and Catharine of Russia, women have not failed
to grasp the large impersonal aspects of life, and successfully and
powerfully to control them, when placed in the supreme position in which it
was demanded. It may also be stated, and is sometimes, with so much
iteration as to become almost wearisome, that women's adequacy in the
modern fields of intellectual or skilled manual labour is no more today an
open matter for debate, than the number of modern women who, as senior
wranglers, doctors, &c., have already successfully entered the new fields,
and the high standard attained by women in all university examinations to
which they are admitted, and their universal success in the administration