Taking it all round, I should say that women in Australia, of the working and middle classes, have a much better time of it than in England. In some ways they do not expect so much. A girl marries a man who is earning a decent wage because she loves him—even in the upper classes there is very little question of settlements, nor does she expect to start at exactly the same point as her parents have reached. I have lived in countries where coolie labour of all sorts is ridiculously cheap, and where a girl whose parents have, say, two hundred a year, need not even trouble to put on her own stockings; is literally waited on hand and foot, and knows nothing either of cooking or house-work, and, after all, I have come to the conclusion that the servant difficulty in Melbourne is by no manner of means an unmixed evil, and that certainly it is a great factor in the making of good wives. In England the attitude of men towards women is completely different from what it is in Australia. At home they expect a tremendous lot of their women, but in the smallest possible way. They must be purely domestic angels on the hearth, and not over-interested in anything beyond it. If they have no hearth on which to practise their virtues, then they are indeed unsexed. The women in Victoria naturally do not like to hear of the stone-throwing, etc., practised by their own sex in the fight for political equality at home, and, I believe, are truly sorry that there seems no prospect of the brains of those in authority being reached in any less forcible fashion; but, then, they literally _cannot_ comprehend a woman’s side of the question being disregarded, simply because she is a woman. They have never themselves resorted to violence, because there was no necessity for it; the laws in Australia being the same for the women as for the men, in divorce, in labour, and the ownership and care of children. When one first lands in Melbourne one may, perhaps, form the hasty opinion that the men are not as courteous to women as they are in England—I am not speaking of the rich and travelled minority, who are much the same all over the world, but of the ordinary middle or lower classes. It is true that the men are not fond of parting with their hats, and will stand and talk to a woman with both hands deep in their hip-pockets. But, though they will not refrain from contradicting her because she is a lady, they will yet give her their fullest attention; and in business as well as pleasure weigh her opinion against theirs as carefully as though she were of their own sex. While men at home continue to treat girls and young women like pretty kittens, merely to be petted and played with, they must not be surprised that they develop at times into mature cats, using their claws, if only to show that they have got them. In England there seems always—everywhere—to be running beneath all social and political intercourse between men and women, and even