The very work of these so-called unauthoritative women passes in the eyes of the world uninstructed in the present artfulness of book-making as the work of so-called authoritative men. It is therefore authoritative. Not in this way did the king-critic get together his dictionary. Johnson’s work evidences his hand on every page and almost in every paragraph. But things are changed from the good old times of individual action. We now have literary trusts and literary monopolies. Nowadays the duties of an editor-in-chief may be to oversee each day’s labor, to keep a sharp eye upon the “authoritative” men and “unauthoritative” women whose work he bargained for at so much a mile, and, when they finish the task, to indite his name as chief worker. Would it be reasonable to suppose that--suffering such school-child discipline and effacement--those twentieth century writers nourished the estimate of “booksellers” with which Michael Drayton in the seventeenth century enlivened a letter to Drummond of Hawthornden?--“They are a company of base knives whom I both scorn and kick at.” It is under such conditions as that just cited that we hear a book spoken of as if it were a piece of iron, not a product of thought and feeling carefully proportioned and measured; as if it were the fruit of a day and not of prolonged thought and application; as if it could be easily reproduced by the application of a mechanical screw; as if it were a bar of lead instead of far-reaching wings to minister good; as if it were a thing to step upon rather than a thing to reach to; as if it could be cut, slashed, twisted, distorted, instead of its really forming an organic whole with the Aristotelian breath of unity, and the cutting or hampering of it would be performing a surgical operation which might entirely let out its breath of life. Until honor is stronger among human beings--that is, until the business world is something other than a maelstrom of hell--it is unmanly and unwomanly to gibe at the “unauthoritative” young woman writing at so much a mile. She may be bearing heavy burdens of debt incurred by another. She may be supporting a decrepit father or an idle brother. She is bread-earning. Oftenest she is gentle, and, like the strapped dog which licks the hand that lays bare his brain, she does not strike back. But she has an inherent sense of honesty and dishonesty, and she knows what justice is. Her knowledge of life, the residuum of her unauthoritative literary experience, shows her the rare insight and truth of Mr. Howells when he wrote, “There is _no_ happy life for a woman--except as she is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in sacrificing herself to their pleasure, their pride, and ambition. The advantage that the world offers her--and it does not always offer her that--is her choice in self-sacrifice.”