Yet modern experience makes it daily more evident that to do any work well requires the employment of one’s whole time with a complete concentration of attention. Now the woman is rare who can put the best of herself both into professional work and into her home. One or other must suffer, and since the standard required in the outside work is fixed and cannot, as a rule, be lowered, if the position is to be retained, it is the home that is certain to suffer. A wife’s and a mother’s duties cannot be accomplished in stray hours snatched from professional work. I speak from my own experience. I know that the attempt to do this results too often in failure, together with an intolerable overstrain. The case is much worse with the industrial worker, the conditions of whose existence make any kind of home life impossible. What, then, is the remedy? The answer that will be given by many is the raising of women’s wages to the same level as the wages of men and the improving of the conditions of labour. This will do something, but it will not do what I want. Conditions that at bottom are continuously wrong need revolutionising, not patching up. The change must be a different one, if the ideal of the home for which I am pleading is to be saved. There is one way out, and only one. The socially wasteful, racially suicidal, and body and soul withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease. I know well the difficulties. Self-centred professional women, worldly women who have never found their souls, cultured intellectuals chasing the new, dreamers who think to reform society—all these and many other women are preaching the doctrine that the economic independence of woman is essential for her own well-being and equality with men. This, as I believe, is a profound mistake that is dependent on industrial values. But on this question I have spoken already, and I shall speak again in a later chapter. Let us clear our thoughts absolutely, or at least as far as we humanly can, from personal standards of value. The home is not a bygone contrivance to be given up as useless in the march of humanity. Each home that is established in love will burn in its children an ineradicable impression that no folly from those who have missed its protection will be strong enough to destroy.