That Woman’s true profession is marriage is a fact commonly blinked in these times when, owing to their greater numbers, it is become inevitable that many women must go through life as spinsters. Not every woman may become the mistress of a home in these days when the proportion of females to males is growing larger and more evident year by year: not all the women and girls can attain to that ideal of marriage which they so ardently desire, now that women outnumber the men in Great Britain and Ireland alone by nearly a million; and so, to cover their failure in life, the unmarried have started the heresy that woman’s mission is domination rather than submission; that woman’s sphere of action and influence is not properly confined to the home, but is rightly universal, and that marriage is an evil which destroys their individuality. These failures, rightly to call those who cannot achieve legalised coverture, are, of course, of all classes, but chiefly and equally of course, they belong to the wage-earning class, and must seek employment wherewith to support their existence in an undesired spinsterhood. The growing competition of women with one another in feminine employments, the higher education of modern girls, the increasing tendency of men to defer marriage, or to remain bachelors altogether--all these causes have led to woman’s turning from the long-since overstocked markets for woman’s work to the more highly-paid functions fulfilled by men. Then, also, the new employments and professions evolved from the increasingly complex civilisation of this dying nineteenth century, have been almost exclusively feminised by the _femmes soles_ who are occupied nowadays as clerks, shorthand writers, journalists, type-writers--_vulgo_ ‘typists’--doctors, dentists, telephonists, telegraphists, decorators, photographers, florists, and librarians. A lower social stratum takes to such employments as match-box making, printers’ folding and bookbinding, and a hundred other crafts. Where deftness of manipulation comes into request these wage-earning women have proved their right to their new places; but in the occupations of clerks, cashiers, telephonists, telegraphists, and shorthand writers they have sufficiently demonstrated their unfitness, and only retain their situations by reason of the lower wages they are prepared to accept, in competition with men, and through the sexual sentimentality which would rather have a pretty woman to flirt with in the intervals of typewriting than a merely useful and unornamental man. It may be inevitable, and in accordance with the inexorable law of self-preservation, that women will continue to elbow men from their stools; but woman cannot reasonably expect, if she competes with man in the open market, to receive the old-time deference and chivalric treatment--real or assumed--that was hers when woman remained at home, and when the title of spinster was not an empty form. She must be content to forego much