croft compares the influence of laws and institutions upon men
to the action of beggars who mutilate their children, when Godwin talks
of the subtle poisons of dogma and custom, which cause mankind to grow
up a race of dwarfs when they should be giants, they seem to be using
metaphors which describe nothing so well as the effect of an artificial
education and a tradition of subjection upon women. One by one the
thinkers of this generation were unconsciously laying down the premises
which the women's movement needed. At the end of all their arguments for
liberty and perfectibility, we seem to hear to-day a chorus of women's
voices which points the application to themselves. There was little hope
for women while the opinion prevailed that minds come into the world
with their qualities innate and their limitations fixed by nature. If
that were the case, then the undeniable fact that women were
intellectually and morally dependent and inferior must be accepted as
their inevitable destiny. Helvetius, all unconscious of what he did, was
the hope-bringer, when he insisted that mind is the creation of
education and experience. When he urged that the very inequality of
men's talents is itself factitious and the result of more or less good
fortune in the occasions which provoke a mind to activity, who could
fail to enquire whether the accepted inferiority of women were so
natural and so necessary as the whole world assumed?

This school of thought revelled in social psychology. It studied in turn
the soldier, the priest and the courtier, and shewed how each of these
has a secondary character, a professional mind, a class morality
impressed and imposed upon him by his education and employment. Looking
down from the vantage ground of their philosophic salon upon their
contemporaries in French society who owed their fortunes and reputations
to the favour of an absolute court, Helvetius and his friends framed
their general theory of the demoralisation which despotism brings about
in the human character. They studied the natural history of the human
parasite who flourished under the Bourbons. They need not have travelled
to Versailles to find him. The domestic subjection of wives to husbands,
the education of girls in a specialised morality, the fetters of custom
and fashion, the experience of economic dependence, the denial of every
noble stimulus to thought and action--these causes, more potent and more
universal than any which work