"The universality of the admission I should certainly deny, were the subject of sufficient importance to justify a discussion. However, I have been absent so long from America, that I confess my ignorance of the last social advance in the striding enlightenment of this most progressive people. According to Moleschott's celebrated dictum—'Without phosphorus no thought,' and if there be any truth in physiology and phrenology, you women have been stinted by nature in the supply of phosphorus. Peacock's measurements prove that in the average weight of male and female brains, you fall below our standard by not less than six ounces. I should conjecture that in the scales of equality six ounces of ideas would turn the balance in favor of our superiority."
"If you reduce it to a mere question of avoirdupois, please be so good as to remember that even greater differences exist among men. For instance, your brain (which is certainly not considered over average) weighs from three to three and a half pounds, while Cuvier's brain weighed over four pounds, giving him the advantage of more than eight ounces over our household oracle! Accidental difference in brain weight proves nothing; for you will not admit your mental inferiority to any man, simply because his head requires a larger hat than yours."
"Pardon me, I always bow before facts, no matter how unflattering, and I consider one of Cuvier's ideas worthy of just exactly eight degrees more of reverence than any phosphorescent sparkle which I might choose to hold up for public acceptance and guidance. Without doubt, the most thoroughly ludicrous scene I ever witnessed was furnished by a 'woman's rights' meeting,' which I looked in upon one night in New York, as I returned from Europe. The speaker was a raw-boned, wiry, angular, short-haired, lemon-visaged female of very certain age; with a hand like a bronze gauntlet, and a voice as distracting as the shrill squeak of a cracked cornet-a-piston. Over the wrongs and grievances of her down-trodden, writhing sisterhood she ranted and raved and howled, gesticulating the while with a marvelous grace, which I can compare only to the antics of those inspired goats who strayed too near the Pythian cave, and were thrown into convulsions. Though I pulled my hat over my eyes and clapped both hands to my ears, as I rushed out of the hall after a stay of five minutes, the vision of horror followed me, and for the first and only time in my life, I had such a hideous nightmare that night, that the man who slept in the next room broke open my door to ascertain who was strangling me. Of all my pet aversions my most supreme abhorrence is of what are denominated 'gifted women'; strong-minded (that is, weak-brained but loud-tongued), would-be literary females, who, puffed up with insufferable conceit, imagine they rise to the dignity and height of man's intellect, proclaim that their 'mission' is to write or lecture, and set themselves up as shining female lights, each aspiring to the rank of protomartyr of reform. Heaven grant us a Bellerophon to relieve the age of these noisy Amazons! I should really enjoy seeing them tied down to their spinning-wheels, and gagged with their own books, magazines, and lectures! When I was abroad and contrasted the land of my birth with those I visited, the only thing for which, as an American, I felt myself called on to blush, was my country-women. An insolent young count who had traveled through the Eastern and Northern States of America, asked me one day in Berlin, if it were really true that the male editors, lawyers, doctors and lecturers in the United States were contemplating a hegira, in consequence of the rough elbowing by the women, and if I could inform him at what age the New England girls generally commenced writing learned articles, and affixing LL.D., F.E.S., F.S.A., and M.M.S.S. to their signature?"
"'Lay on, Macduff!' I wish you distinctly to understand that my toes are not bruised in the slightest degree; for I am entirely innocent of any attempt at erudition or authorship, and the sole literary dream of my life is to improve the present popular recipe for biscuit glace. But mark you, 'Sir Oracle,' I must 'ope my lips' and bark a little under my breath at your inconsistencies. Now, if there are two living men whom, above all others, you swear by, they are John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin. Well do I recollect your eulogy of both, on that ever-memorable day in Paris, when we dined with that French encyclopaedia, Count W—, and the leading lettered men of the day were discussed. I was frightened out of my wits, and dared not raise my eyes higher than the top of my wineglass, lest I should be asked my opinion of some book or subject of which I had never even heard, and in trying to appear well-educated, make as horrible a blunder as poor Madame Talleyrand committed, when she talked to Denon about his man Friday, believing that he wrote 'Robinson Crusoe.' At that time I had never read either Mill or Ruskin; but my profound reverence for the wisdom of your opinions taught me how shamefully ignorant I was, and thus, to fit myself for your companionship, I immediately bought their books. Lo, to my indescribable amazement, I found that Mill claimed for women what I never once dreamed we were worthy of—not only equality, but the right of suffrage. He, the foremost dialectician of England and the most learned of political economists, demands that, for the sake of equity and 'social improvement,' we women (minus the required six ounces of brains) should be allowed to vote. Behold the Corypheus of the 'woman's rights' school! Were I to follow his teachings, I should certainly begin to clamor for my right of suffrage—for the lady-like privilege of elbowing you away from the ballot-box at the next election.
"I am quite as far from admitting the infallibility of man as the equality of the sexes. The clearest thinkers of the world have had soft spots in their brains; for instance, the daemon belief of Socrates and the ludicrous superstitions of Pythagoras; and you have laid your finger on the softened spot in Mill's skull, 'suffrage.' That is a jaded, spavined hobby of his, and he is too shrewd a logician to involve himself in the inconsistency of 'extended suffrage' which excludes women. When I read his 'Representative Government' I saw that his reason had dragged anchor, the prestige of his great name vanished, and I threw the book into the fire and eschewed him henceforth. Sic transit."
Here Mrs. Murray looked up and said:
"John Stuart Mill—let me see—Edna, is he not the man who wrote that touching dedication of one of his books to his wife's memory? You quoted it for me a few days ago, and said that you had committed it to memory because it was such a glowing tribute to the intellectual capacity of woman. My dear, I wish you would repeat it now! I should like to hear it again."
With her fingers full of purple woolen skeins, and her eyes bent down, Edna recited, in a low, sweet voice the most eloquent panegyric which man's heart ever pronounced on woman's intellect:
"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part, the author, of all that is best in my writings, the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward, I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."
"Where did you find that dedication?" asked Mr. Murray.