[144] Op. cit. p. 135. “_Mais si le mensonge est un vice très répandu dans toute l’humanité, c’est surtout chez les femmes qu’il atteint son maximum d’intensité. Demontrer que le mensonge est habituel, physiologique chez la femme, serait inutile: cela est consacré par la croyance populaire._” [145] “There are three things that cannot be trusted: a king, a horse, and a woman; the king tyrannizes, a horse escapes, a woman is perfidious.” [146] See _Life of John Stuart Mill_, p. 162. [147] See _The Subjection of Women_, chap. I, section 7. [148] The observation occurs in Congreve’s _Mourning Bride_, at the end of the 3rd Act, and is put in the mouth of Queen Zara. The precise words are:— “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.” [149] W. L. Courtney (Op. cit.) tells us that portions of the _Subjection of Women_ were written by Miss Helen Taylor (Mill’s step-daughter). [150] Op. cit., section 18. [151] See Sir Almroth E. Wright (Op. cit., p. 32), footnote: “This is a question on which Mill has endeavoured to confuse the issue for his reader, first, by representing that by no possibility can man know anything of the ‘nature,’ i.e. of the ‘secondary sexual characters’ of woman; and secondly, by distracting attention from the fact that ‘acquired characteristics’ may produce unfitness for the suffrage.” [152] J. S. Mill, section 20. [153] Cp. Sir Almroth E. Wright, who, in speaking of Mill’s hypothetical natural woman, says (Op. cit., p. 5): “Instead of dealing with woman as she is, and with woman placed in a setting of actually subsisting conditions, Mill takes as his theme a woman who is a creature of his imagination. This woman is, _by assumption_, in mental endowment a replica of man. She lives in a world which is, _by tacit assumption_, free from the complications of sex.... It is in connexion with this fictitious woman that Mill sets himself to work out the benefit which women would derive from co-partnership with men in the government of the State, and those which such co-partnership would confer on the community.” [154] The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D., calls Mill’s _Subjection of Women_ “admirable.”