I do not accept this as a true definition of independence, but it is sufficient that this represents the ideal of independence that Mrs. Stetson desires. Well, nearly all unmarried women in England are self-supporting. The servant-keeping class is probably less than 12 per cent. of the population; a considerable number of unmarried women even in these classes support themselves. It is only in this servant-keeping class that it has ever been true that there was no means for a woman to get a living except by marriage. And if in the classes below women have married in order to be relieved from working for their living, they have found that the married woman’s life was harder, so far as work was concerned, than that of the unmarried woman. Domestic servants, accustomed to luxurious living and comparative ease as professional servants, willingly consent to marry artisans on 25_s._ a week, and to work harder than any maid-of-all-work would be asked to do. In factory districts a considerable percentage of the married women go out to work; and there is no greater slave to her husband than the woman who receives no support from him. I am far from maintaining that a married woman should not do paid work. In all cases where a wife knows herself to be decidedly below par in housekeeping capacity, it is a natural enough thing that she should wish to make up for her expensiveness in this direction by earning some money by work for which she has more aptitude. But even in this case, unless she has some specially strong aptitude for some kind of highly-paid casual work, she would probably be wiser to spend her energies in trying to make herself better fitted for her position of house mistress. “The development of any human labour requires specialisation,” says Mrs. Stetson. But the _direction_ of human labour requires generalisation; and the married woman, by giving up her post of general, will go down several grades in the army of workers. As it is, she alone amongst skilled workers can watch the development of human beings of both sexes at every stage; the best fitted psychological laboratory in Germany cannot compete with the one that every married woman has at hand in which to study human nature, if only she has the intelligence to know it. Even the domestic servant system at its worst has at least one merit--that it prevents us from ever being able to shut our eyes to the great deficiencies in the education of the working classes. Dismiss our servants to the restaurant kitchen or the bedroom cleaners’ supply associations, and who knows what sham admiration of the working classes, and real apathy with regard to their welfare, may be developed?