A loss of freedom accomplished gradually, this is, on the whole, the sad result of the so-called emancipation of women in our century, if the subject is looked at broadly, apart from the few thousand women of the upper classes in good paying positions. For several decades, I have felt strongly against the importance given by the advocates of women's rights to the work of women outside of the home, for the reasons I have given above. I have applied to such work the objection formulated by Feuerbach in these words: "Mediocrity always weighs correctly, only its weight is false." Wherever we look, in Europe or America, we find new and injurious results from the new conditions, from the free activity of women's work through the development of industry on a large scale, through the transformation of home work, and the growing conviction on the part of women that "celibacy is the aristocracy of the future," to quote the words of a distinguished supporter of woman's rights. Yet it would be foolish to wish a change in these unhappy results through a reaction that would again rob the woman of her essential freedom in relation to her choice of work, and the control of her life. The line of progress is tending towards a new society, where all will be compelled to work and all will find work; where all will work moderately under healthy conditions for an adequate wage. Then neither the unmarried nor the married woman will lose her strength by exhausting work done to earn a living, or impair the powers she needs for motherhood. If she becomes a mother, in most cases she will really rejoice at the possibility offered to her by society of working for society, as a mother and an educator. We are yet very far from such a society, but every social regulation should, as we have said, be tested as to whether it brings us nearer this ideal or leads us farther away from it. The question should be asked whether the direction of thought is encouraged or restricted, that will in the end transform everything, the conviction I mean that economic production is here in the world for the sake of men, not, as now, men for the sake of production; that work is to be done for the sake of freedom, not, as now, freedom created for the sake of work.