she knows in advance that she never intends to live, this is having an illegitimate child in the deepest sense of the word. But this is nevertheless the way in which a number of women now think that “the madonna of the future” is to win a mother’s happiness. Work is always a development of force, and the more it exercises our individual powers, the greater happiness will it give. No part of the old catechism is more valuable than that which is omitted in the new, on the blessings of labour. The path of every cherished and reasonable work might be marked by milestones, on which the good old words should be carved: here “health,” there “welfare”; here “comfort and consolation in adversity,” and there “preventing lapses into sin,”—above all, that of doubting the value of life. But the man to whom work has given all this has all the more reason to curse the work of women, who are able neither to choose their labour according to their talents nor to proportion their hours of work according to their strength. Greater and greater are the multitudes who move forward upon the road of toil, where the milestones bear the inscriptions: ill-health, uncertainty for the morrow as for the future, joylessness, lethargy of the soul, and the sins that thrive in the shadow, above all that of blaspheming life as meaningless. For others again work has come to mean in our time drunkenness, vice, and superstition. It has made men and women unscrupulous, empty, hard, restless. It has made them destroy for others the remaining treasures of life—sorrow, love, the home, nature, beauty, books, peace—peace above all, since it is the condition of the full realisation of suffering as of joy. The grand words about the liberty and the joy of labour mean in reality slavery and trouble over labour, the only trouble our time fully experiences. With thoughtless hymns of praise to this massacring labour, society allows one holy springtime after another to wither without having blossomed—whereas thousands of years ago the cities of antiquity sent their “holy springs” to open up new districts and build new dwellings for men. Just as true as that the losses of the individual mean the poverty of all, when these losses involve a diminution of health and power; just as certain as that nothing becomes better without the desire to improve it, so is it a healthy sign of the times that starvation wages for conscientious drudgery no longer fill young women with heartfelt gratitude. They know, these young women, that their own nature also can be outraged; that there are other suppressed forces in woman’s being besides only the desire of knowledge and the thirst for activity, and that neither the right to work nor that of citizenship can compensate for trampled possibilities of happiness.