Finally, there can be no doubt that Mrs. Mill was largely responsible for the active part her husband took in advocating the elevation of woman's social position. I felt interested to learn whether he had ever replied to his assailants on the woman question. He had given them no answer, nor did he purpose to pay any heed to them. "Why," said he, "forever keep repeating the same thing? Not one of them has produced anything of value." I touched upon the opposition of several physicians, whose objections were based on the necessities of nature to which a woman is subjected. He spoke harshly and positively against the prejudices of physicians in general. Long and tenderly he lingered, on the contrary, on the pleasure women took in performing the duties of the medical profession, and of the decided vocation they not unfrequently manifested for it. He mentioned Miss Garrett, who had recently taken a medical degree in Paris, and praised her as the first woman who had had the courage to make such an attempt. In a letter to me, he had once designated the woman question as "in his eyes the most important of all political questions of the present day." At all events, it was one of those which during the last years of his life personally occupied him the most. He did not hesitate, either in his written or in his spoken words, to use the strongest expressions in order to place in the right light his conception of the unnaturalness of women's state of dependence. Indeed, he had not been afraid to challenge universal laughter through his vehement assertion, that, as we had never seen woman in freedom, we did know nothing whatever until now of her nature; as though Raphael's Sistine Madonna, Shakespeare's young maidens, all the literature about women, in fact, had taught us nothing of the feminine character. On this point he was almost fanatical. He, who in all the relations between man and woman was refinement and delicacy itself, allowed himself to be positively insulting in his expressions when an opinion differing from his own on his favorite topic was uttered in his presence. One day I chanced to be visiting a celebrated French _savant_ when the mail brought him a letter from Stuart Mill. It was an answer to a communication in which the Frenchman had expressed the opinion that the change in the social status of women, demanded in Mill's essay on "The Subjection of Women," might turn out well in England, where it would harmonize with the character of the race, but that in France, where the talents and tastes of the women were so contrary to it, there could be no possibility of success. Mill's pithy reply, which was handed to me with a smile, read as follows: "I see in your remarks that contempt for woman which is so prevalent in France. All that I can say on the subject is, that the French women pay this contempt back with interest to the men of France."