[149] W. L. Courtney (Op. cit.) tells us that portions of the Subjection of Women were written by Miss Helen Taylor (Mill’s step-daughter).
[150] Op. cit., section 18.
[151] See Sir Almroth E. Wright (Op. cit., p. 32), footnote: “This is a question on which Mill has endeavoured to confuse the issue for his reader, first, by representing that by no possibility can man know anything of the ‘nature,’ i.e. of the ‘secondary sexual characters’ of woman; and secondly, by distracting attention from the fact that ‘acquired characteristics’ may produce unfitness for the suffrage.”
[152] J. S. Mill, section 20.
[153] Cp. Sir Almroth E. Wright, who, in speaking of Mill’s hypothetical natural woman, says (Op. cit., p. 5): “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 endowment a replica of man. She lives in a world which is, by tacit assumption, free from the complications of sex.... It is in connexion with this fictitious woman that Mill sets himself to work out the benefit 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.”
[154] The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D., calls Mill’s Subjection of Women “admirable.”
[155] A certain French writer, despite a wholly mistaken admiration for J. S. Mill, is nevertheless bound to admit, in reference to Mill’s Subjection of Women and his strangely wild and unreasoning infatuation for Mrs. Taylor, that: “Il n’en est pas moins curieux et remarquable que, sous l’aiguillon de ce sentiment, cet esprit froid, si fort, si durement logique, ait pris sans hésiter cette attitude.” See Psychologie de la Femme, by Henri Marion, (Paris, 1903, p. 257). In his Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers the Rev. R. H. Hutton, M.A., writes as follows on Mill’s relation to Mrs. Taylor; “His passionate reverence for his wife’s memory and genius—in his own words ‘a religion’—was one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not possibly make to appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the eyes of the rest of mankind.” (See Vol. I, p. 173.) See the same work for some sharp and well-deserved criticism of Mill’s Utilitarianism.
[156] Germania, chap. IX.
[157] Ibid., chap. XLV.
[158] See Decline and Fall, chap. IX.