Evidently, then, the advocates of woman’s claims—­those who hold that “the virtues of the man and the woman are the same,” with Antisthenes,—­or that “the talent of the man and the woman is the same,” with Socrates in Xenophon’s “Banquet”—­must be cautious lest they attempt to prove too much.  Of course, if women know as much as men without schools and colleges, there is no need of admitting them to these institutions.  If they work as well on half-pay, it diminishes the inducement to give them the other half.  The safer position is, to claim that they have done just enough to show what they might have done under circumstances less discouraging.  Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing.  It is a valid answer, that the only tools habitually needed by woman have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket, and tradition reports that she herself invented all three.  In the same way it may be shown that the departments in which women have equalled men have been the departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement, and equal compensation,—­as, for instance, the theatre.  Madame Lagrange, the prima donna, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm, sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling-expenses for ten persons, country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of bracelets, bouquets, and billet-doux.  Of course, every young debutante fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a brief stage-vista between.  On the stage there is no deduction for sex, and therefore woman has shown in that sphere an equal genius.  But every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the enjoyment of her two hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered by the knowledge that the young college-stripling in the next school-room is paid a thousand dollars for work no harder or more responsible than her own,—­and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been obstructed for her and smoothed for him.  These may be gross and carnal considerations; but Faith asks her daily bread, and Fancy must be fed.  We deny woman her fair share of training, of encouragement, of remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her instincts and her intuitions,—­say sentimentally, with the Oriental proverbialist, “Every book of knowledge is implanted by nature in the heart of woman,” and make the compliment a substitute for the alphabet.

Nothing can be more absurd than to impose entirely distinct standards, in this respect, on the two sexes, or to expect that woman, any more than man, will accomplish anything great without due preparation and adequate stimulus.  Mrs. Patten, who navigated her husband’s ship from Cape Horn to California, would have failed in the effort, for all her heroism, if she had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her Bowditch.  Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses