Those who are acquainted with _The Subjection of Women_ will probably reply that Mrs. Taylor, or Miss Helen,[149] did feel it incumbent upon them to state a little more precisely what they meant by the use of the word artificial; for Mill proceeds to write as follows: “It may be asserted, without scruple [fine scruples these!!!], that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relations with their masters.”[150] This means that a “true,” a “natural” woman once fell into man’s hands, and that since that time she has been distorted out of all recognition. But we may very relevantly ask Mesdames Taylor, how, when and where they have had the unique privilege of coming across this wholly “true” and “natural” woman? Presumably, she was not only a “true” woman, but also a “truthful” woman; she was not only a “natural” woman, but a guileless, honest woman, devoid of all malice and vanity—in fact quite unlike the woman Manu knew, or the woman Adam knew. At what period in history did she appear and fall into the distorting hands of man? By what scientific process have Mesdames Taylor acquired any knowledge of her? We only know of woman as she is seen to-day, in history, in the literary remains of antiquity, and in savage tribes. Whence comes this alleged “true” and “natural” woman, beside whom the woman we know is only a distorted caricature? To postulate a norm that is wholly hypothetical, and then to argue that by the side of that gratuitous creation, the woman that we know, and have seen mirrored in history, in the tradition of mankind, and in the work of our acutest psychologists, is a monstrous distortion, may prove a useful means of clouding the issue, but can hardly be allowed to pass as an argument. And the fact that Mill, the logician, the critic of Spencer and Sir William Hamilton, wrote this, and the whole of the remaining paragraph, surely demonstrates how very far he was from being himself when he wrote this particular book.[151] We therefore deny the possibility of any second meaning to Mesdames Taylor’s sentence, except this, that, like “true” women in argument, they are trying to foist a spurious distinction upon their opponents, with their two words “artificial” and “natural,” so that henceforth all those who allege anything but pleasant things about women, may be promptly gagged with the retort “Artificial!” A little later on in his _Subjection of Women_ we read the following: “For, however great and apparently ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and women might be, the evidence of their being natural differences could only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which could not possibly be artificial—the residuum, after deducting every characteristic of either sex, which can admit of being explained from education or external circumstances.”[152]