Until such time as this procedure was unmasked, Mill's political
economy enjoyed an unquestioned authority.

Exactly the same plan was followed by Mill in handling the question of
woman's suffrage. Instead of dealing with woman as she is, and with
woman placed in a setting of actually subsisting conditions, Mill
takes as his theme a woman who is a creature of his imagination. This
woman is, _by assumption_, in mental endowments a replica of man. She
lives in a world which is, _by tacit assumption_, free from
complications of sex. And, if practical considerations had ever come
into the purview of Mill's mind, she would, _by tacit assumption_, be
paying her own way, and be making full personal and financial
contributions to the State. It is in connexion with this fictitious
woman that Mill sets himself to work out the benefits which women
would derive from co-partnership with men in the government of the
State, and those which such co-partnership would confer on the
community. Finally, practising again upon himself the same imposition
as in his _Political Economy_, this unpractical trafficker in
abstractions sets out to persuade his reader that he has, by dealing
with fictions of the mind, effectively grappled with the concrete
problem of woman's suffrage.

This, then, is the philosopher who gives intellectual prestige to the
Woman's Suffrage cause.

But is there not, let us in the end ask ourselves, here and there at
least, a man who is of real account in the world of affairs, and who
is--not simply a luke-warm Platonic friend or an opportunist
advocate--but an impassioned promoter of the woman's suffrage
movement? One knows quite well that there is. But then one suspects