ent personal importance. Whatever the risk, the sum of the argument is all on the side of work. And there is the joy and satisfaction of work, the interest of a thing growing under your hand, the beauty of a day humming with a vital interest instead of broken into little bits and thrown away like waste paper. Once it was difficult, almost impossible, for a girl of breeding to have a career. Think of poor Jane Austen, dropping her white sewing hastily over her writing when a guest came in, that she might not be called ungenteel! And it is only fifty-seven years since Elizabeth Blackwell, applying for permission to win a medical diploma, was refused by a dozen colleges, one of which added to its refusal the interesting statement that "it would be unbecoming and immoral to see a woman instructed in the nature and laws of her organism." Now, in ne United States alone, there are seven medical colleges for women besides the men's colleges to which they are admitted, more than seven thousand are practicing physicians and surgeons, and the theories for and against such things are being forgotten in the light of their actual work. The same opposition met every new venture. About fifty years ago an Englishman tried to introduce watchmaking among his countrywomen, a delicate and profitable trade in which hundreds of Swiss women were employed, but his initial lecture on the subject was mobbed and broken up by British prejudice; and though three venturesome souls did try to follow his suggestion and learn the trade, persecution finally obliged them to give up. Now there are over four thousand watch and clock makers in the United States, and a woman may learn any trade she pleases without opposition, almost without comment. If there is still a visible contempt of her processes, a tendency to take her lightly or humorously in her enterprises, that is a legitimate effect of her frequent want of training, her lack of scientific or practical preparation for what she undertakes. Too often she plunges in without knowing the a, b, c of finance and law, relying on a vague, sentimental faith that people will be kind to her where intelligence and a working plan would be her only safeguards. There was a woman who started a small business enterprise on capital lent her by a friend. The business prospered so well that, at the end of a year, the friend's husband stepped in and crowded her out. At the suggestion that she should take her papers to a lawyer and see what could be done, she stopped bewailing man's unkindness long enough to explain that she had no papers. The money had been lent by a supposed friend: how could she insult friendship with talk of a contract and signatures? Any one who could suggest that did not understand her finer sensibilities. So she lost her year's work and did not even gain common sense. There was another woman who borrowed a thousand dollars of an elderly friend to start what she called a "gift shop," a little store where her own good taste could make itself felt and the seeker for Christmas and birthday gifts could find inspiration and the right thing without hunting through the endless rubbish of the big shops. Her friend wrote out a check very readily. "But it is a free gift," he explained. "You can't possibly succeed in that, — it's a crazy idea, and you don't know enough. I shall never think of the money again. Don't bother about formalities." Nevertheless, the woman insisted on a formal I OU, and added a pledge of six per cent interest. To his protest that this was wholly unnecessary, she said, "I know you believe in my honesty, but I want you to respect my judgment." Knowing of just that single remark, one is not surprised to learn that she paid principal and interest when the year was up, and ran the little shop prosperously until a bigger opening took her into new fields. To a lack of business training is often added a dire ignorance of the times. A government employer of many women clerks has declared that not one in twenty reads the papers or knows anything of geography or contemporary events. "Ask them if the Panama Canal is to be at sea level or not, and they will stare as if you were talking Chinese," he complained. "They may read the horrors in the papers, but they skip everything of value." He had his finger flatly on one of woman's chief defects, the lack of broad, impersonal interests. The average girl's horizon is bounded on the north by her clothes, on the south by her social relations, on the east by her private hopes, and on the west by her income; four solid walls that shut out very thoroughly the world's light and movement. She can never go very far in any but mechanical work until she climbs out into wider horizons, and she will remain at the world's mercy until she opens her mind by an interest in what happens outside her circle of acquaintance. In speaking of the satisfaction of a working life, I had in mind something more than the work that means so much time exchanged for so much money. Compared with the whole five million, those who are free to work with hearts and heads, as well as hands, are few; and yet the United States census for 1900 shows 7387 doctors and surgeons, 1010 lawyers, 807 dentists, 1041 architects and draughtswomen, 3373 clergywomen, 6857 actresses, 3580 photographers, 2680 gardeners and florists, 15,632 bookbinders, 84 civil engineers, 293 bankers and brokers, and 2193 journalists. Such lives have a background of |