i 4 2 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



contempt. Nor can their claim be allowed that they pay taxes 

 to hire substitutes in a voluntary army. For sacred duties there 

 can be no substitutes ; and, besides, our best soldiers tell us 

 with unanswerable reason that the time has come when the 

 country needs all the men it has. In the light of this logic, then, 

 every woman who has borne a child should have the franchise; 

 but not a single man who has not done his turn of military 

 service. And moreover such men should by rights be forced to 

 pay the taxes for the whole army and navy. But in our brainless 

 nation, the mother has no vote ; the father of a large family pays 

 nearly as much as the gay and careless bachelor ; and the 

 soldier and dutiful volunteer as much as one who serves the 

 State not at all ! 



But, say the pretended scientists, the women do not possess 

 the knowledge and judgment of the men. Good gracious, how 

 many men possess either ? As for knowledge, most of them 

 know a few tricks, learnt from others, which they call a trade or 

 a profession, and which as a rule they perform indifferently. 

 Not one in a thousand ever reads a worthy book, ancient or 

 modern, or, after his schooldays, ever troubles himself again to 

 study anything. Their knowledge, like that of most women, 

 comes from newspapers, poor novels and plays, picture shows 

 and current talk — good enough perhaps for the mass of 

 humanity. Women have their own knowledge, of the same 

 level. Is the man who knows only how to rivet boilers or how 

 to sell cheese a better judge of national policies than a woman 

 who knows how to cook or how to keep a happy home ? 



In the end, what proof have we that the knowledge and 

 intelligence of women are inferior to those of men ? To measure 

 either with close enough accuracy for comparison is almost 

 impossible. The assertion that such measurements have been 

 made by " Science," with this or that result, is a pretence and a 

 falsity. The only possible justification might be that women 

 have not taken the first place in most of the highest lines of 

 intellectual work, science, art, and invention. But such work is 

 the rare, the very rare, efflorescence of mind ; and we must not 

 judge the average degree of knowledge and intelligence by such 

 exceptional phenomena; while other causes than that of mere 

 inability may be at work. 



A man of any experience of the world, looking broadly at 

 the human race of the present, will not easily accept the im- 



