How, in striving for emancipation, woman has reached such a dismal stage in her development is one of the saddest stories of our time. The age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to work. But to work, except in a few vocations such as art, is in our time to specialize oneself, and the freedom of women has necessarily resolved itself into a permission to do little things which can give them no final satisfaction. Their freedom is bounded by the slavery under which men, too, suffer; and in changing their occupations they have not escaped from the cage, but only out of one compartment of it into another, a little more cheerless than the first. They have achieved a little more liberty than they had before; but this liberty is disenchanting because it leaves them as far away as ever from the full liberty of their spirit. Perhaps in no other age has woman been, in a deep, instinctive sense, so skeptical as she is at present. And for all this the age--an age in which labor has a fantastic prominence--is responsible; for it is in a time when everybody works, and when there is nothing conceivable that one can do but work, that the cantankerous question of inequality arises. Only in a race can one be slower than another; only then does the necessity to become as good a runner as the fastest come home poignantly to every one. But if it should happen that life is not a race at all? Where leisure is regarded as a more important thing than work and work falls into its proper, subordinate place as the mere means to leisure one does not think very much about inequality, for it has no longer any urgent importance. Nor does one set much value, except in superficials, on uniformity. Among people free from crushing labor (as the whole human race may some time be) there has always been delight in diversity and scorn for uniformity; for, to people enjoying their spirit and the world, diversity even when it is exasperating is of infinite interest, giving a satisfying sense of the richness of life.