Even there, however, women still find it much too difficult for them to enter a peculiarly easy, honourable, and lucrative profession. Their elocutionary powers are shown on the stage as well as the platform. Their capacity for writing sermons is plain to every one familiar with recent literature. Their ability to preach is recognised cordially in the Salvation Army, as well as by Spiritualists, Quakers, Unitarians, and Universalists. Much of the pastoral work is done by women, in actual fact; and more ought to be. The Sunday-school, choir, social gathering, and other important auxiliaries to the pulpit are almost entirely in female hands. Women enjoy practically the monopoly of those kinds of church work for which there is no pay; and their exclusion from the kind which is paid highly, in the largest and wealthiest denominations, looks too much like a preference of clergymen to look after the interest of their own sex. The most orthodox churches are the most exclusive; and the same forces which are driving bigotry out of the pulpits are bringing women in. This reform is one of many in which a much more advanced position has been taken by New England and the far West than by the South; and the American Transcendentalists led public opinion in the section where most of them lived. In Great Britain the struggle has been carried on in the interest of the middle and lower classes, and under much opposition from the class to which most admirers of philosophy belonged. No wonder that one of the keenest critics of Transcendentalism was prominent among the champions in England of the oppressed sex. John Stuart Mill declared, in his widely circulated book on _The Subjection of Women_, that "nobody ever arrived at a general rule of duty by intuition." He held that the legal subjection of wives to husbands bore more resemblance, as far as the laws were concerned, to slavery, than did any other relationship existing in Great Britain in 1869. He did not argue from any theory of natural rights, but pointed out the advantage to society of women's developing their capacities freely. He also insisted on the duty of government not to restrict the liberty of any woman, except when necessary to prevent her diminishing that of her neighbours. This last proposition will be examined in the next chapter. The fact that Mill's great work for freedom was done through the press, and not on the platform, makes it unnecessary to say more about him in this place.