The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women is not elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who need uplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that is accomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who are not their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they do not affect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with ours. In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundred avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories; like Charles Lamb’s fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner of streets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advance in professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyers more scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been served by a “saleslady” does one leave the shop with a feebler sense of injury than was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter—a duller consciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed hands? Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial to the colder virtues? In studios of artists is the “sound of revelry by night” invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the immoral books—the books dealing with questionable “questions”—always, or even commonly, written by men? There is one direction in which “emancipation of woman” and enlargement of her “sphere” have wrought reform: they have elevated the _personnel_ of the little dinner party in the “private room.” Formerly, as any veteran man-about-town can testify if he will, the female contingent of the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable. That element now remains upon its reservation; among the superior advantages enjoyed by the man-about-town of to-day is that of the companionship, at his dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorable vocation. In the corridors of the “French restaurant” the swish of Pseudonyma’s skirt is no longer heard; she has been superseded by the Princess Tap-tap (with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the “emporium” of Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the receipt of customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison Hash. That the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this emancipation of Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the “private room” is too obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the table talk of good young women who earn their own living.