ese are only brilliant exceptions, the rejoinder is, What proof
have you of that? You cannot pronounce on the powers of the average till
you have tried them. These exceptions rather prove the existence of
unsuspected and unemployed strength below. If a few persons of genius,
in any class, succeed in breaking through the barriers of routine and
prejudice, their success shows that they have left behind them many more
who would follow in their steps if those barriers were but removed. This
has been the case in every forward movement, religious, scientific, or
social. A daring spirit here and there has shown his fellow-men what
could be known, what could be done; and behold, when once awakened to a
sense of their own powers, multitudes have proved themselves as capable,
though not as daring, as the leaders of their forlorn hope. Dozens of
geologists can now work out problems which would have puzzled Hutton or
Werner; dozens of surgeons can perform operations from which John Hunter
would have shrunk appalled; and dozens of women, were they allowed,
would, I believe, fulfil in political and official posts the hopes which
Miss Wedgwood and Mr. Boyd Kinnear entertain.

But, after all, it is hard to say anything on this matter, which has not
been said in other words by Mr. Mill himself, in pp. 98-104 of his
'Subjection of Women;' or give us more sound and palpable proof of
women's political capacity, than the paragraph with which he ends his
argument:--

'Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater
functions of politics are incapable of qualifying themselves for the
less? Is there any reason, in the nature of things, that the wives
and sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as
competent as the princes themselves to their business, but that the
wives and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of
companies, and managers of public institutions, should be unable to do
what is done by their brothers and husbands? The real reason is plain
enough; it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality
of men by their rank than placed below them by their sex, have never
been taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with
politics; but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural
to any cultivated human being, in the great transactions which took
place around them, and in which they might be called on