can give. It is no favor of men to the exceptionally gifted woman which has grudgingly opened college and laboratory to the brilliant members of the sex which has waited so long for recognition of its right in education. It is no gift of generosity to girls of average talent and circumstance which starts belated tradeschools, and makes the High and Normal Schools more accessible to them as preparation for wage and salary earning. The unpaid service of women to the home and to social order throughout the ages demands as merely decent recompense every chance to live and to grow, to do and to be, that the world of to-day can offer. For men to refuse this, now that social science has revealed the race-indebtedness to women, would be to proclaim themselves bankrupt of honor in the Court of Justice. For women to fail to hear the new call to social service which the new time sounds in their ears would be to throw the assets of ages of drudgery into the waste-heap. For women of the privileged few to fail in perception and realization of that sex-solidarity which is not sex-antagonism but simple fidelity to the Guild of Womanhood, is pitiful proof of the dwarfing effect of past subjection. 5 The "new conscience," of which Jane Addams speaks so convincingly in her recent articles on the social evil, is but one expression of the growing conviction that the problem of woman's personal freedom and woman's social duty is one and the same problem. It reaches from the dark chasm of traffic in womanhood by greed and lust to the heights of honor where the

"Jane Addams, A New Conscience in Regard to an Ancient Evil.

6

women of light and leading enrich and beautify the world. To-day this problem is acute, and many of its elements confused and confusing, because all the other special problems of our time, political, economic and social, reach their deepest significance and most vital application in relation to womanhood and the home. Here, as in all other crisis-efforts toward human progress, education, more and more effective education, is the watchword. Here, as elsewhere, it is only "culture that shall yet absorb chaos itself."

'Lavinia L. Dock, Hygiene and Morality.

VI

THE VOCATIONAL DIVIDE

A LECTURER on educational topics was once riding over a bleak hill in New England to reach an evening appointment and fell into conversation with her young driver, who was secured for the occasion by the proprietor of the livery stable because he "couldn't spare a man to go so fur." Talking with the lad, the lady ascertained that he was regularly employed in the mill which loomed so large in the valley landscape they were leaving behind, and that he had learned to drive so as to get an odd job now and then when, as in the present instance, the "mills shut down" for any reason. The boy was frank and somewhat boastful about his family affairs. His father "worked in the mill," he said, "was a weaver; got nine to ten dollars every week." His sister worked too; she "got as much as five or six dollars most weeks." His brother was beginning and he got sometimes a dollar and a half. His aunt, "she lived with them, and she was awful smart, most the best weaver in the mill," and she got eleven or twelve dollars a week and "didn't have to pay hardly any fines, she was so careful." "And your mother?" asked the lady; "what does she do?" "Oh,"

answered the boy proudly, "she ain't in the mill; she used to work out, but she don't have to now we take care of her.” "Oh, I see," said the questioner, "she does not work; how nice that is." "Why, yes, she does work, too," said the boy rather resentfully, "she works all the time-she's the best mother in town; she takes care of the house and cooks for us and puts up our dinners and mends the clothes and does everything."

"Ah," said the inquiring economist, "I see, she is most useful-and what wages does she get?" "Why, she don't get wages at all," responded the boy, beginning to be a bit confused, "she does the things in the house. She works, of course she does, but there ain't no money into it." "Oh, I see," again said the lady, and closed the brief interview with the conventional hope that they were all kind to the best mother in

town.

A young couple, just nearing the wedding day, were discussing ways and means relative to housekeeping in that delightfully engrossing manner suited to the intimate character of the situation. Not "standards of living" was the subject in hand, but how "he" and "she" were to live together in the new Paradise they were to enter. They had reached the critical stage when the parallel columns of "must haves" and "want to haves," being set down with careful precision, mount up so frightfully in the sum total. Having in mind the small salary of an instructor in college, they soon reached the conclusion that the things one must do without are far more numerous than those one can

secure.

Suddenly the bride-to-be exclaimed: "But, Henry, we are trying to put all the things we have both had and both want into one income. You are earning $2,000 and I am earning $900 and that is $2,900, and not just your $2,000. Can't I earn something, too, so we won't have to do without so many things?" "No, indeed, my beloved one," said the groom-to-be, "I should despise myself if I could not take care of you, and properly. No, you can never earn outside the home after we are married." "But -but," faltered the beloved one, "you see we have not yet allowed anything for domestic help in either of our lists. We should have to have a scrubwoman and a laundress and that would cost something even with no maid, and it mounts up frightfully without that. Couldn't I do something to earn as well as do all the housework to save?" The answer came with hesitancy: "Of course, you ought to have a maid; but I don't see how we can afford it just at first. Of course, I shall earn more later on, and with you to inspire me very soon. I don't know how these household things are managed. My father, you know, was a minister with a small salary and mother did everything about the house. Is it very hard?" he asked tenderly. “Perhaps not," she said; "you know I have been at school and college and teaching and I don't really know; but I shall learn to do everything perfectly, of course, and make the little home what it should be. But that does not seem to make me save more than the maid's wages and what her food might cost. We still have to do without a frightful lot of