So there is nothing in the eternal fitness of things proclaiming the male as the necessary superior of the female throughout Nature. The fact is that the question of equality and of general superiority and inferiority has no place in regard to male and female from a naturalist’s point of view. It is true that women are so 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 compared 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 women of the English working class, Mr. Gladstone (at that time the head of the Government) 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 £120 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 inferiority 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 excelling one another in diverse qualities and capacities. Without this complementary division of fitness and quality our life would be a monotone robbed of the infinite variety which characterises humanity. What Mr. Gladstone estimated as being less by one-third in women than in men is power--work-value--whether physical or intellectual. I think Mr. Gladstone’s estimate must be admitted as true.