manual labor of others as the common run of women through their own effort. She must efficiently oversee and direct her slaves or servants to the required ends of family comfort and well-being at whatever personal cost. The fundamental definition of lady still stands as "a woman at the head of a household." Second, the lady must not earn money; she must not be a producer of any values not included in domestic and social occupations as outlined in the "theory of the leisure class." No one has ever been disturbed, it would seem, at the actual overwork of women; either of the multitude or of a special class. The lady may properly labor to nervous prostration in superintending incompetent or too numerous helpers in a too elaborate scheme of life; but she must not use power toward "self-support" in the accepted sense of that phrase. To become a wage-earner, or acquire a salary, even at congenial and comparatively easy work, has until very lately broken the caste of the lady. On the other hand, she may and should do all kinds of work that call for leisurely accomplishment and demand only personal or friendly standards of excellence. Fine needlework; decorative weaving; "arts and crafts" in reminiscent play-work; illuminating or binding books that only wealth can own or preserve; preparing for and managing the often arduous duties of the salon or the drawing-room; "entertaining," not only intimate friends, but in the stately and formal commerce of society; all these things belong to her as by common consent.

She is also associated with the cultivation of fruits

and flowers in the garden which forms her appropriate out-of-door setting, and the love and service of tamed beasts are hers at command. She is close-linked with many forms of recreation and she may rightfully exhaust herself in play activity, but not as a professional worker. Men, as well as women, have so emphasized this point-that the lady must not earn money or do things that servants do that various customs, like the foot-binding of the Chinese women, have been adopted, which forcibly prevent the lady from being improperly useful. The reason for this on the part of men, as has been often shown, is their desire to demonstrate their wealth and power by having in the family idle, or seemingly idle women, to "show off,” while they retain for themselves the really interesting and important activities. The other fact, however, that women's energy estopped from old paths of labor always has found and always will find for itself other channels of activity, is less often noted. And the more important fact that the self-found ways of interest and effort which have been used by the lady have potential social value as well as a possible social danger, has still less often been demonstrated.

What are the main forms of activity which the lady has developed and made peculiarly her own?

In the first place, women of leisure and social command have quite universally displayed a seemingly natural tendency toward the refinement of manners and the elaboration of a social code. This code tends to become as exact and binding for domestic and recreative life as laws and military rule for business and

statecraft. The social dangers inhering in this activity of highly placed women are plainly to be seen. The conventional code often leads to extremes of conservatism, to superficial ethics divorced from the common life and to the substitution of canons of taste for laws of morality. The results have often made the reactions of domestic and "society" standards upon the larger life of education, religion, politics and economics, hurtful to human growth. The lady has always tended too much toward confounding pleasant manners with good character; and to confusing with ethical values of the vital sort, those expressions of refinement and culture in dress, modes of politeness, easy command of the elegant in personal accomplishment, which it has been her main business to secure. Many women's colleges, and some women's organizations, to-day show this tendency toward the small and superficial in moral judgment as a result of the "sequestration of the feminine intellect." On the other hand, the larger social value of regulated, gentle, thought-suggestive, artistic and cultural intercourse between men and women, age and youth, is definite and important. In the miscellaneous population of our own country it is coming to assume primary importance as the most difficult of social conditions to maintain. The modern tendency toward social progress is strikingly toward greater variety of relationship and associated effort among an increasingly diversified civic and national group. To-day, therefore, especially in the United States, we have the greatest need for expert guidance along most intricate social ways in car

rying out collective regulations for the common good. The tendency of man, outside of his noble personal friendships with his chosen few, has always been, and in general still is, toward a free and easy manner with the crowd when "off duty," which often degenerates into coarseness or curtness; while in serious relationships he tends as surely toward the positions of chief and subordinate. Both of these masculine tendencies result in extreme clumsiness in the adjustment of details of fraternal action in the mass. This is shown with painful clearness in the difficulty experienced in making democracy "work." What Ambassador Bryce justly called our "administrative awkwardness" keeps our technique of political advance woefully behind our accepted ideals. The average man, although a "good mixer" on the surface of things, has so far not attained the golden mean between command and intimacy in the more diffused but important social concerns. Especially is this true of the Anglo-Saxon man. He is not able to play the game of life “like a gentleman" except with his special cronies. Social democracy will demand of us all the manners of the noble of France, combined with the morals of the broader-minded puritan, and the skill of the great lady in keeping everyone in good humor. For social democracy, if it means anything at all, means a way of life which will include in social control, social adjustment and social provision a thousand things now left to private arrangement or neglect. If, as Bagehot says, "The ages of despotism were needed to set the mould of civilization,"—our present civilization of

modified aristocracy with its coarse-fibred and partial political control-may it not be that the ages of conventional training in the artistic blending of personalities in polite society will presently justify themselves? Woman's share in social culture, as the lady who can command courteous treatment, as the creator of a group atmosphere in which all must show their best and none must browbeat or bore another, as mistress of the art of bringing useful and pleasant things to pass without friction and by the appeal of gentleness and good cheer, is surely not a small one. If, as we now think, the gifts of economic mastery and political control are to be tempered more and more by consideration, sympathy and mutual aid to ends of universal sharing of best things, the lady's "diamond edition" object-lessons may well be copied in the large. The lady herself, however, will have to outgrow her narrow prejudices and her caste distinctions if she is to take part in the process. Meanwhile, the gentle breeding and orderly behavior which the lady displays and secures, her special sphere in which there is no coarse familiarity and no churlish avoidance, provide at least one small spot in the social organism in which compulsion becomes attraction and thought flowers to imagination and the commonplace itself becomes the rich soil of fair and happy living. In so far as the elaboration of a social code, and the "morality of personal habits," and the attention to details of individual adjustment have concerned themselves with normal forms of family life, and with cultural recreation, they have already enriched the larger social