MR. GLADSTONE'S OPINION 119 



very much less endowed with muscular strength than 

 men that practically every woman is inferior to every 

 man in this respect. It is also true that woman's brain 

 is smaller than man's, and that apart from mere size, the 

 intellectual activity and capacity of women, by whatever 

 test you examine it, is less than that of man. When 

 exceptional cases on both sides are excluded, the definite 

 intellectual inferiority of the average woman, as com- 

 pared with the average man, is established as a fact. 

 The observations of those concerned in the education of 

 young men and young women side by side confirm this, 

 and it is further demonstrated by a consideration of the 

 intellectual performances of average men and average 

 women. That, at any rate, is my own experience as a 

 University teacher. But women, on the other hand, fill 

 a place in human life as mothers, and administrators of 

 detail, and as companions, in which man, by the nature 

 of things, cannot compete with them at all. 



At the house of the late Sir James Knowles, some 

 twenty-five years ago, when discussing the relative value 

 of the physical and intellectual capacities of the men as 

 compared with the w r omen of the English working class, 

 Mr. Gladstone (at that time the head of the Govern- 

 ment) said to me, " I am of opinion that the relative 

 value of a man and a woman is in all classes of society 

 about the same as it was in my grandfather's time in 

 Jamaica when they purchased slaves. They gave \%0 

 for a man and 80 for a woman, and that is a fair 

 measure of their relative value all the world over." It 

 is necessary to remember that Mr. Gladstone was not 

 estimating the ultimate value of woman in human life 

 when he said this. He would, I think, have considered, 

 as I do, that it is absurd to attempt to estimate that or 

 to raise a discussion as to general superiority and inferior- 

 ity in reference to the male and the female of the 

 human species. They are creatures as necessary one as 

 the other, differing from one another profoundly and 



