ined rationality and beauty of its aspirations for
the improvement of collective social life, make this piece probably the
best illustration of all the best and richest qualities of its author's
mind, and it is fortunate that a subject of such incomparable importance
should have been first effectively presented for discussion in so
worthy and pregnant a form.

It is interesting to know definitely from the Autobiography, what is
implied in the opening of the book itself, that a zealous belief in the
advantages of abolishing the legal and social inequalities of women was
not due to the accident of personal intimacy with one or two more women
of exceptional distinction of character. What has been ignorantly
supposed in our own day to be a crotchet of Mr. Mill's was the common
doctrine of the younger proselytes of the Benthamite school, and Bentham
himself was wholly with them (_Autobiography_, p. 105, and also 244);
as, of course, were other thinkers of an earlier date, Condorcet for
instance.[4] In this as in other subjects Mr. Mill did not go beyond his
modest definition of his own originality--the application of old ideas
in new forms and connections (p. 119), or the originality 'which every
thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing
truths which are common property' (p. 254). Or shall we say that he had
an originality of a more genuine kind, which made him first diligently
acquire what in an excellent phrase he calls _plenary possession_ of
truths, and then transfuse them with a sympathetic and contagious
enthusiasm?

[Footnote 4: Condorcet's arguments the reader will find in vol. i. of
the present series of these _Critical Miscellanies_, p. 249.]

It is often complained that the book on Women has the radical
imperfection of not speaking plainly on the question of the limitations
proper to divorce. The present writer once ventured to ask Mr. Mill why
he had left this important point undiscussed. Mr. Mill replied that it
seemed to him impossible to settle the expediency of more liberal
conditions of divorce, 'first, without hearing much more fully than we
could possibly do at present the ideas held by women in the matter;
second, until the experiment of marriage with entire equality between
man and wife had been properly tried.' People who are in a hurry to get
rid of their partners may find this very halting kind of work, and a man
who wants to take a new wife before sunset, may well be irrita