It is important, again, that all those women who are forced to continue working for wages should enter into the social question at least as much as is necessary to make them understand the duty of solidarity and the need of organisation if they would obtain the higher wages, the shorter hours, the summer holiday, and the better conditions in other respects which they must win in order to preserve in some degree their spiritual and bodily powers and with them that measure of joy in life which everyone may thus possess. The first condition for this is that girls who live with their parents should cease to take work at other rates of pay than those which the wholly self-supporting can live on; and that women in general should cease to think themselves meritorious merely because they work—without troubling about the harm their underpaid labour may do to the whole community. But it is not only the will to elevate their own lives, but above all a more lively feeling for social organisation as a whole that these working women need. Their personal demands for education, rest, beauty, love, motherhood, must be placed in connection with those of everyone else, so that they may begin to claim also for others what they desire for themselves. Instead of making their own existence poorer by unfortunate experiments, they ought to fill the souls of other women with their dreams of a more beautiful life. And to be able to do this they must be constantly active and on the watch, giving and taking on every hand. Thus innumerable little streams swell the flood of wills, which shall one day remove the old landmarks between the power to wish and the compulsion to renounce. Thus shall the woman deprived of love be able to forget her own little lot in the destiny of the many, and in spite of the limitations of her own life to feel that she lives by feeling the beat of humanity’s heart in her own. CHAPTER VI EXEMPTION FROM MOTHERHOOD To him whose thoughts go beyond the surface of life to its depths, the demand for the right of motherhood is a sign of health, an evidence of the existence in a nation of the strong, sound woman’s will to people the earth, without which the nation shall no longer live upon earth. Even if certain manifestations of this will fall short of the life-enhancing purpose, in itself the will is only worthy of respect. It is, however, significant of the confusion of ideas on this subject that the evidence of health inspires terror in the guardians of morality, while they regard with calmness that tendency of the age which is charged with the materials of tragedy, alike for the individual and for the nation—namely, the desire of exemption from motherhood.