After all, self-supporting women must always be the exception, not the rule; for it is the destiny of the vast majority of women to be wives; and regarding these even Mr. Mill admits “it is not ... a desirable custom that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family.” Now surely it would be most absurd, as some “strong-minded” women are trying to do, to arrange the educational scheme of all women so as to benefit the exceptional women who are excluded from matrimony. A thousand times more important is it to change woman’s education so as to enable her to look after her household affairs. It is by neglecting to do this that women supply the second cause for the increasing prevalence of Bachelors. Every man is expected to learn his trade properly before marriage; but woman’s proper occupation—the art of taking care of home and making it a paradise, is commonly supposed to be a thing that can be learned easily enough after marriage. Even when a woman is so wealthy that she is not obliged to do any housework at all, she should, like a ship’s captain, learn all about the duties of subordinates, else she will be unable to command them properly. A captain who displayed ignorance on any point before his sailors would lose their respect and attitude of prompt obedience; and it has been suggested that one reason why American women, especially, have so much trouble with their servants, is because they know so little about domestic economy that the servants, ignorant as they are, become arrogant because of their superior knowledge. On the subject of woman’s sphere, Herbert Spencer has written words which should be hung in golden letters in every schoolroom: “When we remember that up from the lowest savagery civilisation has, among other results, brought about an increasing exemption of women from bread-winning labour, and in the highest societies they have become most restricted to domestic duties and the rearing of children; we may be struck by the anomaly that at the present time restriction to indoor occupations has come to be regarded as a grievance, and a claim is made to free competition with men in all outdoor occupations.... Any extensive change in the education of women, made with the view of fitting them for business and professions, would be mischievous. _If women comprehended all that is contained in the domestic sphere, they would ask no other._ If they could see all that is implied in the right education of children, to a full conception of which no man has yet risen, much less any woman, they would seek no higher function” (_Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. § 340). When every woman has learned how to cultivate flowers and vegetables in her domestic garden at the same time, the millennium will have arrived, and the word Bachelor be found only in Dictionaries of Antiquities.