Mr. Mill found time for a "considered opinion," of great elaboration and weight; it has been printed elsewhere.[130] With his reply to Miss Nightingale's humble but argumentative questions, we are not here concerned. Though she never took any prominent part in the movement for female suffrage, she joined the Society in 1868, allowed her name to be placed on the General Committee in 1871, was an annual subscriber to its funds, and in 1878 sent an expression of her opinion on the subject for publication.[131] It was, however, Mr. Mill's remarks upon her "personal situation" that now, in 1872, came back to her. "If," he had said, "you prefer to do your work rather by moving the hidden springs than by allowing yourself to be known to the world as doing what you really do, it is not for me to make any observations on this preference (inasmuch as I am bound to presume that you have good reasons for it) other than to say that I much regret that this preference is so very general among women." She ought not, he went on to suggest, to hide her good deeds; and "finally I feel," he wrote, "some hesitation in saying to you what I think of the responsibility that lies upon each one of us to stand steadfastly, and with all the boldness and all the humility that a deep sense of duty can inspire, by what the experience of life and an honest use of our own intelligence has taught us to be the truth." To some of this expostulation she had at the time a conclusive rejoinder. She could not write to the _Times_ and say, "Be it known that I suggested such and such a dispatch to a Secretary of State, and am corresponding in such and such a sense with a Governor-General." But if she were out of office, the plea for seclusion behind the scenes failed; nor was it ever perhaps of much cogency in relation to her views on religious and social matters. Now that she had "gone out of office," was it not her duty to come into the open with her pen? [130] In the _Letters of John Stuart Mill_, 1910, vol. ii. pp. 100-105. [131] Quoted in Bibliography A, No. 93. III