with a formal charter; renouncing all authority over her, and
promising her security against all infringements of her liberty which
might proceed from _himself_.

To this lady he is always ascribing credit for his eminent
intellectual achievements. And lest his reader should opine that woman
stands somewhat in the shade with respect to her own intellectual
triumphs, Mill undertakes the explanation. "Felicitous thoughts," he
tells us, "occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they
are mostly lost for want of a husband or friend . . . to estimate them
properly, and to bring them before the world; and even when they are
brought before it they generally appear as his ideas."

Not only did Mill see woman and all her works through an optical
medium which gave images like this; but there was upon his retina
a large blind area. By reason of this last it was inapprehensible
to him that there could be an objection to the sexes co-operating
indiscriminately in work. It was beyond his ken that the sex element
would under these conditions invade whole departments of life which
are now free from it. As he saw things, there was in point of fact a
risk of the human race dying out by reason of the inadequate
imperativeness of its sexual instincts.

Mill's unfaithfulness to the facts cannot, however, all be put down to
constitutional defects of vision. When he deals with woman he is no
longer scrupulously conscientious. We begin to have our suspicions of
his uprightness when we find him in his _Subjection of Women_ laying
it down as a fundamental postulate that the subjection of woman to man
is always morally indefensible. For no upright mind can fail to see
that the woman who lives in a condition of financial dependence upon