gotten how we used to tremble at his frown, sink back into our chairs as he shouts:

"Down! Sit down. I was about to say, when you so rudely interrupted me, that to these two names I would join the name of him who has shared in their toils, their struggles, and their triumphs, a man whom we have seen rise from the lowest position in the Carleton Iron Works to the very —"

But here, gentle reader, modesty impels me to draw the curtain.

WOMEN WHO WORK1

OCCUPATIONS OPEN TO WOMEN

BY JULIET WILBOR TOMPKINS

EARLY five million women go to work every day in the United States, go to paid work, whether the returns be two dollars a week or ten thousand a year. Sixty years ago Harriet Martineau, while visiting America, declared that she found here but seven occupations for women: teaching, needlework, taking boarders, typesetting, employment in cotton mills, bookbinding, and domestic service. Now there are scarcely seven occupations closed to them; they are pouring out into the world of activities, and the five million will be six at the next counting.

Whether or not you or they like the change is wholly unimportant. As some one has suggested, the early eohippus may have resented changing into a horse, and his neighbors may have greeted his development in the matter of hoofs and legs with acidly critical comment; but, when once started horseward, nothing could stop him: he had to adjust himself to the outer conditions that demanded one concentrated toe in the place of five. In the same way woman, when she turns her face down town in the early morning, is being swept along in a great, vague, irresistible wave of economic change.

She will pass an alarmist uttering his dismal note on every corner; his warning is prophetic of lost charm, lost power, and lost position. One declares that presently man will cease altogether to support woman, if this thing 1 Republished by special permission of The Success Company, Copyright, 1906.

goes on increasing, and then how about home and mother? The answer to that—not new, but worth repeating is that man never has supported woman. To support means to provide with the necessaries of life. Who was doing the larger share of this, the man who raised and sheared the sheep, or the woman who carded and spun and wove the wool, and cut and sewed the clothes? the man who shot the bird, or the woman who plucked and cooked it? the man who provided the yarn, or the woman who knit the stockings? It was a fairly even matter, this "support," in the days when most of the human needs were worked out under each individual roof, and the woman's vigorous part did not seem to weaken her partner's efforts; nor was there any lament of pseudochivalry against her pulling her full share, or even a little more. Support, indeed! A day in the life of an average great-grandmother leaves little romance on that score, to those who interpret the word honestly.

As a matter of fact, economists have shown that vastly more women are supported now, for their work has been taken from them. One by one their familiar tools have degenerated into old lumber or picturesque relics. The mills and stores can provide for the family better than they can; one woman can easily run a household now, and the others, to produce their share, must invent new household necessities or earn an equivalent in money of their old-time spinning and churning. Think what housekeeping was in the days when not even a cracker or a shirt or a candle came ready-made, and contrast that picture with the prepared, bottled, tinned, smoked, woven, hemmed, trimmed, ready-to-wear short-cuts of to-day. When the modern mother is active, the daughters simply must go to work outside; they are driven forth for lack of jobs within.

When they do not go, they are being supported to an extent that would have made the average great-grandmother stare. Wealth makes this unimportant; but, in humbler homes where the necessities are bought instead of made and yet there is but one source of money, we often get a picture of a shriveling, careworn father staggering under a weight of strumming, embroidering, spending daughters that makes us rejoice in that swelling five million at their gainful occupations. How can they do it, these kindly, careless girls; and what will become of them when they have worked their victim to death? Surely some change in a system that allows such uneven burdens need not make us fear a lessening of woman's intrinsic value: she will have gained in every sense when she becomes ashamed to rest her healthy young weight on overworked shoulders. That by going to work she competes with man and reduces his earnings is a problem for professional economists to struggle with; though it has been suggested that, as a producer, she always has competed with man and reduced his earnings, whether she wove her own clothes or earned them with a typewriter.

"No one will marry you, my dears!" says the alarmist to the young women of business. If they are young enough, they answer in their hearts, "Nonsense!" whatever their lips may say; as they grow older, the inner repudiation may become tempered with a faint doubt. It is certainly true that the modern man- of the educated world - marries less early and often than did his grandfather, and any grandmother can give you the reason.

But, in spite of the increased cost of living, in spite of the turn given by sport to energies that once knew no outlet but love-making, and in spite of the comforts of clubs and bachelor apartments, still many men do marry. I wish I could say that the modern preference is clearly for

the alert, self-helpful woman of affairs, the girl who has mastered a profession or the one whose trained mind can put through a real-estate transfer or a deal in May wheat: in time I believe that this may be true; but as yet, a limited personal experience says otherwise. We have traveled a long way since the odious Dr. Maginn made his sneering comment, "We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman as we do from a parrot, because they are so unexpected"; but the level head is still outrivaled by the curly head, whether we like the admission or not.

Statistics may prove the contrary, but it has seemed to me that the women who work and who are thrown with men in daily practical contact are less likely to marry than those who meet men only by lamp and candle light. Vanity suggests that this is the woman's choice, but I do not believe it. I believe that nearly all single women past thirty, no matter how brilliantly successful their lives may be, are secretly crying in the wilderness: they want love and children, and the want can not be stilled or satisfied with anything else.

To the frank this would seem like an argument against going to work, but there is an argument for it so vastly greater that it overwhelms this, which is, after all, only a general tendency and need not apply to the particular case. On the other side lies the splendid fact that the woman with a trade of her own does not need to marry. She may wait until love comes, with no anxious thought of "chances," no compromise with her heart or head: she may keep the door open for the best thing of all, instead of shutting it on a possible half best. If she misses altogether, she is not an economic hanger-on, a maiden aunt to be passed about among relatives, but an independent factor in the world's processes. When hope goes, she still has dignity and a purpose; she still has her independ