The simple matter is that a good _mind_ has good reasons and good intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive popular phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in full possession of your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when you must; to your acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger; and to your reason, when the question requires debate. It would be greatly for the good of the race if the common virtues should become more instinctive in men; and if women should be put into a position in which they can reflect more wisely upon the virtues which are only just in process of getting known to be such. The only reason that women do not guide themselves by far-reaching principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have not made themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy and of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice, so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted that it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions merely learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely convinced of, it may leave one side, but not what it really _knows_. Nor is there any danger that woman will lose her powers of intuition. The knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social matters will not desert her because she has made herself familiar with the speculations of philosophers, and can turn to them for guidance in the intricate questions of conduct which the complexities of modern life give rise to. So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master, her task was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider responsibilities. They are now aware that it is their highest duty _to be_ the best possible kind of a human being, and _to do_ whatever lies within their strength towards making the world the best possible kind of a world to live in. For this end they have urgent need of _all_ the gifts that God has given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the ground that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a grievous wrong. CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN. CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN. I. CRUELTY. Spencer says[24] that among savage nations the women are as perverse as the men, and that if they do not work so much evil it is because they are less able to do so. This is not entirely true; doubtless women among savages are much more inclined to cruelty than to pity, but, generally speaking, woman even at the very beginnings of human evolution is less cruel than man. WOMAN AND WAR.