exposed; but they constitute a real barrier to industrial opportunity. On the whole, the vast and unwieldy array of laws and rules designed either to protect the woman worker, or to safeguard the future of the race at her expense, are a pretty lame result of a great deal of humanitarian sound and fury. _Parturiunt montes._ It is quite natural that the result should be lame; for these protections and safeguards represent so many attempts to mind some one else’s business; and the great difficulty about minding some one else’s business is that however good one’s intentions may be, one can never really know just where that some one’s real interests lie, or perfectly understand the circumstances under which he may be most advantageously placed in the way to advance them, for the circumstances are too intimately bound up with his peculiar temperament and situation. As Mill has remarked in a passage which I have already quoted, the world has learned by long experience that affairs in which the individual is the person directly interested go right only when they are left to his own discretion, and that any interference by authority, save to protect the rights of others, is mischievous. The tendency of modern welfare-legislation is to make a complete sacrifice of individual rights not to the rights but to the hypothetical interests of others; and for every individual who happens to benefit by the sacrifice, there is another who suffers by it. If it is hard to regulate one human being for his own good, it is impossible to regulate people _en masse_ for their own good; for there is no way of making a general rule affect all individuals in the same way, since no two individuals are to be found who are of precisely the same temperament and in precisely the same situation.