And so I have learned a lesson Which I ought to have known before, And which, though I learned it dreaming, I hope to forget no more. So I sit alone with my conscience, In the place where the years increase, And I try to remember the future In the land where time will cease. And I know of the future judgment, How dreadful soe’er it may be, That to sit alone with my conscience Will be judgment enough for me. GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT FOR WOMEN. BY MRS. PATTIE L. COLLINS. No other issue of the day has absorbed me like the ever vexed problem of woman’s work. I have read at various times many learned dissertations upon women’s duties, women’s spheres and women’s capabilities; her few successes and countless failures; most of them from the pens of men, and a few from her own sex, but the first have, as a class, been almost purely theoretical, and the second incomplete, one sided and argumentative rather than instructive. A certain popular author wisely observes that “Everything depends upon the point of view.” It is scarcely possible for a man from his standpoint to take in the difficulties and intricacies that lie all along the path of the gentle sex in the pursuit of work, and after having obtained it, its successful accomplishment at a salary not at all commensurate with its value. And the task is equally difficult for a woman, since misfortune begets the most disagreeable and unreasonable form of egotism, and the burden of her grievance demoralizes her logic and vitiates the force of her statements. I am distinctly conscious of all this as I approach the subject, and only a long and crucial experience has given me the courage of opinions. One fact seems to be lost sight of in the ceaseless clamor concerning “women’s rights,” viz.: that most of them have more “rights” than they enjoy, and conspicuous among them, the privilege of earning their own living. The avenues of remunerative employment are only too few, and each is filled to repletion with a hungry multitude. There are those, the achievements of whose genius have lifted them beyond all praise or blame and given them a rich and well merited reward, but it is not to these exceptional cases that the ordinary laws of the great struggling masses can apply. The world has known but one Mrs. Browning, one George Eliot, one Patti, one Nilsson, but the example of these daughters of the sky soaring and basking in the sunlight has only served to accentuate the gloom and toil of the dwellers in the valleys below. Spirits such as these must ever remain apart from the constant, harassing struggle of average women, and this is the class for which I write.