Weighted with human selfishness, perhaps this is impossible. Majestic in aspect, great in magnitude, in energy and action, they will never be morally grand till they are established and perpetuated in absolute equity. In that hour the scales of Justitia will hang in equal balance above the head of the masculine and feminine worker. Whatever _their_ difference, there will be no disparity in the equity which shall measure, weigh and reward equal toil. To-day the departments of Government teem with kindness and favoritism to individual women. What they lack is justice to woman. This they have lacked from the beginning. What a comment on human selfishness is the fact, that with all the legislation of successive Congresses, the employment of women in the departments of the Government is to-day as it was in the beginning—perpetuated in favoritism and injustice. Civil Service Reform, as carried on, is a mockery and a sham. Nowhere has its hollow pretence been so visible—so keenly felt—as in its utter failure of simple justice to the woman-worker in the public service. From the beginning, when her work has been tacitly recognized and rewarded as a man’s, her sex has been proscribed. The first work given to women from the Government was issued from the General Land Office, as early, if not earlier, than President Pierce’s administration, and consisted of the copying of land warrants. This work was sent to their homes. They received it in the name of some male relative, and for that reason were paid what he would have received for doing it, viz., twelve hundred dollars per annum. One lady supported a worthless husband (the nominal clerk) and her two children in this way, doing all his work for him. Another supported herself, her two nephews, and educated them out of the same salary. During Mr. Buchanan’s administration, this work was taken out of feminine hands, to a very large extent, and the few allowed to retain it were paid only six hundred dollars. Somewhere in this era the first woman clerk appeared in the Treasury. She was a wife who, during her husband’s illness, was allowed to take his desk and to do his work, for his support and their children’s. This she continued to do until her second marriage; but it was _in her brother’s name_. She copied and recorded, did both well, and was paid—not because she did well, but because she did her work in the name of a man—sixteen hundred dollars per annum. Thus, while this lady performed the work of a man, and performed it in his name, as a woman her presence at the desk was a subterfuge, and her official existence ignored. Without recognition or acknowledgment, the woman-clerk system in the Treasury Department is an outgrowth of expediency. Like many another fact born of the same parentage, it soon proved its own right to existence, and refused to be extinguished.