This, his eldest son later remarked, was “the worst [paragraph] he ever wrote” (J.S. Mill 1961, 98). Most of Mill’s critics were quick to seize upon it, if only because its conclusion contradicts two of Mill’s oft-stated premises, namely that each of us is the best judge of our own interests and that anyone having unchecked power is bound to abuse it. As William Thompson argued in Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825), Mill’s premises pointed to the widest possible extension of the franchise, and not to the exclusion of “one half the human race,” viz. all women.