Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/62

 almost invariable tendency is to place her influence in the same scale with social considerations. 'With such an influence in every house, either exerted actively or operating all the more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder that people in general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic of modem times?'

You know well that this is not my view of the condition or the influence of women. My words summarize the judgment of Mill. He himself might have drawn a brighter picture had he been able to watch the effect of improved education since 1869. Even at that date the darkness of the sketch was, you will say, overcharged. So be it; but Mill's unjust disparagement is assuredly not wholly devoid of truth. It suggests two reflections which ought not to be hastily rejected. The one is that the domestic virtues may obtain too much rather than too little influence in the transaction of public affairs. Our politicians