of women workers would disappear with the disabilities of labourers in general, and not a stroke of legislation would be required to make industry both safe and profitable for the woman worker. This condition is not unnatural or impossible. It is the present condition of chronic unemployment, of expensive and ineffectual “welfare” legislation, of wasteful and futile struggles between organized capital and organized labour--it is this condition that is entirely unnatural. I have mentioned its cause in Chapter III, and I shall discuss it further in my next chapter. Upon its removal, and not upon regulations which hamper the woman worker and reduce her to the status of a function, the future of the race depends. The ancestors of coming generations are men as well as women, and posterity will derive its heritage of health from its ancestors of both sexes. Its prospect of health will not be improved by legislation calculated to safeguard the health of women workers, so long as the children they bear continue to be exposed to an involuntary poverty which breeds ignorance, imbecility, disease and crime. The happiness as well as the health of future generations will depend in great measure upon the extent to which both men and women can release themselves from the deteriorating conditions of economic exploitation. II It is in business and in professional pursuits that the occupational progress of women, and their emancipation from traditional prejudices, are most marked. Although in the lower ranks of labour in these pursuits there is a mass of women who, impelled by necessity, work for low wages at mechanical tasks which offer no chance of advancement, there is, nearer the top, a large group of women who have been more fortunate in worldly position and education, and who are spurred as much either by interest in their work or a desire to be self-supporting, as by actual need to earn; who share, in other words, the attitude that leads young men to strike out for themselves even though their fathers may be able to support them. It is the woman animated by these motives who is doing most for the advancement of her sex; for it is she, and not the woman who works through necessity, who really challenges the traditional prejudices concerning the proper place of women. The woman labourer proves the _need_ of women to earn; the business woman or professional woman who works because she wants to work, is establishing the _right_ of women to earn. More than this, as she makes her way into one after another of the occupations that have been held to belong to men by prescriptive right, she is establishing her claim, as a human being, to choose her work from the whole wide field of human activity. It is owing to the attitude towards life adopted by such women, to their preference of independence and action over the dependence and passivity in vogue not so many years ago, that it is coming to be quite the expected thing that young women of the