employment, they clear sixty dollars a week; and she says she would rather work at it for her bread, than at sewing for ten times the money. The truth is, it is a business she is fond of." I have shown you that a very large number of women are compelled to self-support; that the old idea, that all men support all women, is an absurd fiction; and, if you require other evidence than mine, you may find it in the English courts, under the working of the new Divorce Bill. Nearly all the women who have applied for divorces have proved that the subsistence of the family depended upon them. Out of six million of British women over twenty-one years of age, one-half are industrial in their mode of life, and more than two millions are self-supporting in their industry like men. Put this fact fully before your eyes. Driven to self-support, you have seen, also, that low wages and comparatively few and overcrowded avenues of labor compel women to vicious courses for their daily bread. The streets of Paris, London, Edinburgh, New York, and Boston, tell us the same painful story; and in glaring, crimson letters, rises everywhere the question,--"Death or dishonor?" I have shown you that there is encouragement for moral effort, because these women escape from vice as fast as they find work to do. "Have they strength for the conflict," you ask, "or desire to enter such fields?" Find your answer in what they have done from the earliest ages, with the foot of Confucius and Vishnu, of capital and interest, upon their necks. In the lovely lives of Bertha and Ann Gurney, and the powerful attraction of Sarah Scofield, you have found pleasanter pictures whereon to rest your eyes. Let no man taunt woman with inability to labor, till the coal-mines and the metal-works, the rotting cocoons and fuzzing-cards, give up their dead; till he shares with her, equally at least, the perils of manufactures and the press of the market. As partners, they must test and prove their comparative power. We must next consider what need woman's moral nature has of work, and what sort of opposition man practically offers her. FOOTNOTES: [11] "Now that we can produce artificially, and from waste and even noisome materials, the ethereal liquids to which the fragrance of the pear, the pineapple, and the melon are due, and can manufacture spirits of wine from coal-gas and oil of vitriol, we can scarcely be over-sanguine as to what we shall yet effect as competitors with living organisms in the production of certain compounds."--GEORGE WILSON'S _Life of Forbes_, p. 129. [12] What I mean here will be understood by a reference to Emile Souvestre's "Philosophe sous les Toits." In a pretty story of two women employed in a clasp-factory, he speaks of their low wages, and says, that, having worked for thirty years, they had seen ten masters grow wealthy and retire from business, without having changed, in any degree, their own position.