despoil the precious and lovely freedom and joy of the potential mother. Some time we must be wiser and shield and protect, as now even the most careful parent finds it almost impossible to do alone and unaided by social customs and ways of living, what nature has asserted by her most solemn commands to be the first right of human beings of the mother-sex, namely, a happy and natural girlhood. Given that for the majority of the sex, given the right use of the period of marriage and maternity not only as related to the duty to the family but also as that may be a preparation for the best use of the later years, then indeed would the second youth of women show such fruitage in personal values and in social service as the world has not yet seen. Then would it be clearer, even to dull perception, why more women than men live to old age and why more women than men "keep the child-like in the larger mind" and hence may have many a belated spring-time of growth.

The moral of all this must be pressed home to the master forces of vocational direction and control. It must of all things be emphasized that not only is "teaching woman's organic office in the world," but that married women and mothers have done most of the teaching of all the younger children in all the past civilizations, and there are the best of reasons why they should continue to do so. Instead of penalizing the marriage of women teachers the public school management of the United States should offer a premium for the marriage of these women; especially those whose proved fitness for the teacher's office presents

the first diploma in the curriculum of successful motherhood. The private schools now utilize such women both as heads of schools and as teachers. The premium that should be offered by the public school system need not and should not be a continuance in the school work under the same exhausting and inexorable demands which are met by the unmarried teacher, who works so well after her many years of experience in "the system" while trying so heroically to change and improve it. The premium given the married woman-teacher, with children or of whom society may expect offspring of a needed kind, should be in freedom of choice of lines of work, in adjustable hours, and in all other details of flexibility of service needed by the housemother. Although compensation should of course be given, the scale of wages of these part-time workers should not disarrange those schedules which secure to unmarried teachers, who give uninterrupted service for a long career and who constitute the permanent staff in every school, their full share of “equal pay for women for equal work with men" in the higher competitions of professional life. Such schedules are a vital need, not only for the sake of justice but for the right use of those exceptional educators among women who, whether married or unmarried, can serve as superintendents and heads of departments in the highest positions. There is nothing more needed in education, however, than a vastly increased teaching force, and a corresponding opportunity to modify and vary the grade system, especially in the elementary schools, to suit the needs of a wider range of child

capacity. We ought to have two or three part-time married women teachers to every celibate woman, younger or older, who gives whole service to the public schools. Moreover, the care-taking of the weak and ignorant and undeveloped, the moral protection of children and youth in recreation and in labor, the succor of the needy, and the general expression of social control and social uplift, these are woman's special functions in the social order and have ever been her peculiar responsibility. The vital need in these fields to-day is not alone for a minority of trained workers, such as the Schools for Social Workers are turning out each year, but also for a large majority of citizens devoted to the public weal and able and willing intelligently to carry out and perfect, modify and balance the schemes of the experts and "paid workers" who make "scientific philanthropy" a life work. Women will doubtless always take a larger share in this part-time service in the lines indicated than men can do; and older women, those in the third stage of life, are now entering this field with enthusiasm. As volunteers and as helpers, paid and unpaid, they are doing much of the constructive and ameliorative, the reformatory and the preventive work of social reform. When, however, women enter this field late in life, or after a merely amateur and impulsive response in earlier life to the call of social need, they enter by a vocational leap, as it were, from the inner to the outer circle of human interests. This gives, at the worst, an awkward meddling with established rules of procedure; and at best fails to give highest effectiveness. Women who

have had four years of college and two years of special training in a Teacher's College or School of Philanthropy and then, after two to six years of professional work in their chosen field, marry to take charge of an individual home, are too valuable assets of educational opportunity to be left without social pressure and financial incentive to continue that work with the necessary modifications. The same is true of the minister, the lawyer and above all the doctor and the nurse, as well as of all other women specialists in professional labor.

The difficulties of the woman-worker who marries and has children increase as we go down the scale through commercial, clerical and manual employments; but they are not insuperable; and the ingenuity of industrial mechanism needed for the higher utilization of the paid work of women in other than purely private domestic lines waits for development only for a more just perception in the common sense regarding women's work-power. The present pressure upon the wages of men that makes so many housemothers obliged to add to the family income at the worst time of their lives for economic strain, and at any work they can get, however exploited and health-destroying, is no solution of the problem; it is an aggravation of it dire in social results. Real solutions of social problems are not worked out by people wholly "under" their circum

stances.

With, however, a true solution of the problems of womanhood, achieved not by flights of fancy but by patient infinitesimal efforts of daily living in which no

inherited or present duty is neglected, and no opportunity for shaping toward future conditions is ignored, we shall gain at last for social culture in all lines, and for industry in many forms, a needed class of slowlytrained, slowly-apprenticed workers in every field where women naturally excel; to rise finally at the third period of their lives to positions of command where women are now most needed. This will mean new ways of conserving hitherto exploited capacities and gifts of the mass of mankind. For women of the right sort and the right training, shielded by men's protection and care from the heaviest economic pressure during early life and developed in personality by the special demands upon them in the home, will see to it when they arrive at their rightful place of control that neither professional demand nor the industrial order shall take such a heavy toll from life itself in the effort to make a living!

"Old men for counsel?" Yes, surely, now as of old; and it is well for humanity that it learned this bit of social wisdom so early. Old women for new work for the race? Yes, surely; and well will it be for human progress when mankind learns this new lesson of social wisdom and makes fitting social use of the post-graduate mother, eager and fresh in her second youth, for a new path-finding for the feet of the coming generations before she draws down the curtain and says Good-night.