Advance any opinion on woman’s nature, consonant or not with a sane view of the women of to-day, the women of history, the women of myth, and the women of tradition, and immediately Mrs. Taylor would shoot up from behind her neatly framed and quasi-learned sentence, and declare that your opinion was quite incompatible with her alleged and hypothetical “residuum.”[153] All argument was thus stifled for ever, all discussion, all inquiry, all belief! But what did Mrs. Taylor care? With all those who were susceptible of being duped by her verbal conjuring, she had achieved this remarkable success, that she had silenced them on the subject of her sex’s vices and virtues. These sentences, and many more like them, constitute the burden of the argument in _The Subjection of Women_, and make it not only valueless, but also dangerously misleading. The pamphlet remains the most unhappy record of Mill’s character as a thinker. It is impossible here to examine this hermaphrodite pamphlet line by line; but the fact which makes the disingenuousness of these early lines so monstrous is that the remainder of the book depends upon them, evolves necessarily from them, and falls entirely to the ground if it be deprived of them. When, therefore, it is remembered that this book has exercised a potent influence over half a century of English life,[154] and that its principles have formed the basis of many hundreds of books of the same kind, and of a movement which ultimately fixed the coping-stone into the arch of stupidity supporting our political life, we cannot too severely condemn, not only the carelessness of a man who could so imperfectly distinguish senile sentimentality from his duty to the public, but also the unscrupulousness of two full-grown females who could take advantage of an old man’s blind infatuation in order to mar books, written under his own signature, with the dialectical tactics of contentious and indignant housewives.[155] Even if we examine the historical value of the ostensibly historic basis of Mill’s contention, we find it entirely unsubstantiated by fact. Mill says: “What is now called the nature of women is an entirely artificial thing—_the result of forced regression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others_.” Taken up by a thousand angry female voices, this came to mean at the end of the nineteenth century that, if women were _as they were_—inferior to man in intellectual power, in honesty, in reliability, in social instincts, in taste, etc.—it was because throughout their history as a sex they had been oppressed and deprived of the opportunities of improvement. Now, even if the first part of the sentence were true (and we have already shown how false it is), the latter part remains utterly untenable.