"If we examine the conditions of the working-classes, after years and years of male legislation, what a hideous set of conditions we find. Intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence among the poorer classes. And yet we spend over £22,000,000 annually on the education of these people. Surely there is something wrong somewhere. What is it that we, seeing this condition of things at our very door, have, as women, to be so grateful for in male legislation?" The writer fails wholly to perceive that these factors she deplores as due to defective masculine legislation are effects less of faulty measures than of faulty Humanity. Measures are the gauge of the men who frame them. And men are very much the measure of the mothers who bore them. Those which she properly characterises as the "hideous" conditions of the working-classes, "intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence" are circumstances legislation cannot remedy unless the hearts of legislators are moved to do this, and their hands are empowered, moreover, to do it, by the collective will of those they represent. Except all are content to subordinate their personal interests to the general welfare, and to improve their personal morale for their own and for the common good, Acts of Parliament can do but little. Drunkenness can be penalised by legislation, difficulties put in the way of obtaining drink. But intemperance can be effectually stamped out only by individual men and women so rising to higher levels of thought and self-control as voluntarily to become sober; or by men and women so improving in brain and constitution that the craving for drink--now recognised as a disease--no longer obsesses them. Acts of Parliament may condemn insanitary and defective dwellings, may compel landlords to repair them to degrees of decency and comfort; may pull them down and build others in their stead. But none of these measures will eradicate the bad housing of dirty and comfortless, or of demoralised and demoralising homes. The best house possible becomes bad housing for its occupants when the woman at the head of it fails to do her duty therein, in consequence of industrial labour which leaves her neither time nor energy to make a clean, well-ordered, cosy and inspiring home of it; or because her own idleness or ignorance, her drunkenness or worthlessness, results in her neglect of it. Human conditions, like human measures, result from the personalities, good or bad, capable or incapable, of those who create them. III The Feminist's faith in the masculine prerogative of Legislation, as being a possible panacea--had _she_ but part in it--for every ill beneath the sun, is one of her gravest disqualifications for taking part therein.