the near future; and that if a man’s own sense will not teach him that he has no right to make helpless women suffer (as women must suffer who find themselves destitute in middle age), he should be treated like a criminal and punished by a jury, which should be composed of women who have suffered in their turn through their parents’ selfishness. Naturally this would be impossible, but I do wish men’s consciences could be awakened, and every successful man who is working hard, spending all he makes, and adding yearly to the frocked darlings in the nursery with scarcely an _arrière pensée_, would remember in the dead of the night, when one’s sins generally find one out, that the day of reckoning will come--that some day the children brought up in luxury and accustomed to think the world their own will be faded spinsters (for out of a large family some are sure to remain unmarried in these days), and that all the sweetness and light of the early life will be forgotten, and the father will be cursed when these faded, sorrowful women have to look forward to nothing but patient starvation or a corner grudged to them by their more successful relations, to whom they can never be anything save incumbrances; for these disappointed ones of the earth always resent prosperity in anyone else, and are apt to snarl and snap at those who dole them out the bread they so unwillingly take. Why should not the State compel every working man with two or more daughters (after two the case should be legislated for) to pay in a part of his income to some fund for providing for the women? And by working men I mean those who have no capital except their brains--the artists, lawyers, clergymen, professional men of all kinds, who have nothing but themselves to depend upon. The man making and spending his 1,500_l._ a year should be forced to put by at least 200_l._ a year for the poor girls who come into the world without their own consent, and who are left absolutely destitute, save of a certain amount of distaste for anything save enjoyment, and an absolute dislike of doing anything save just what it pleases them to do at the moment; while at the same time a properly mapped-out education should be provided that will enable them to earn something in addition to the pittance the State would be keeping for them against a rainy day, but which would be something on which they could rely with certainty, and which would allow them to contemplate possible illness without the deadly sinking that fills the breast of any woman who has absolutely nothing but her own self to rely upon, and who knows she must starve or seek the cold comfort of the corner mentioned before if she cannot continue her labour.