The honest working girl shuns the society of the wealthy wanton, and the stupid ignoramus, whatsoever his fortune, is accorded no seat at the symposiac--is blackballed by the brotherhood of brains. Imagine Goethe giving Richter the "marble heart" or Byron snubbing Burns because of his lowly birth! The world would be quick to rebuke their arrogance, would assure them that a singer was not esteemed for his siller, but for his song. In the carnival case it was a question of beauty not of boodle, of popularity instead of purses, and to exclude from the contest a candidate of the working class was to acknowledge her superiority and avenge defeat with brutal insult that would shame the crassest boor. The King of Syracuse was not ashamed to contend with the humblest for Olympian honors, nor the Emperor of Rome to measure swords with Thracian gladiators to prove his skill at arms. Ever does genius sympathize with folly and the truly learned with the unlettered; but Mammon "least erect of all the angelic host that fell from heaven," puts the mark of the beast on the brazen foreheads of all who bow down to his abominations. When working-girls are treated thus, what wonder that some of them become imbittered, discouraged, and go head-long to the devil--affording the wretched pharisees whose brutality wrought their ruin, an opportunity to "rescue" them and pose before the world as Christian philanthropists! What inducement has a young and beautiful woman to toil early and late for an honest livelihood when by so doing she forfeits the right to be called respectable--is flouted by even the paltry plutocracy of a country town and proclaimed a social pariah by such a headless phthirius pubis as Halliwell! If labor be no longer respectable wherein are our thousands of virtuous working girls superior to prostitutes? Clearly if the dictum of Halliwell be correct it were better for the daughter of poverty to regard her face as her fortune and hasten to sell herself--with approval of law and blessings of holy church--to some old duffer with ducats and be welcomed by the "hupper sukkle" as a bright and shining ornament. Or if no beducated old duffer can be come at, she might marry the first shiftless he-thing that offers itself and pick up a luxurious livelihood for her family among her gentlemen friends, as so many enterprising society women now do, and be "respectable" to her heart's content--even a devout church member and prominent in "rescue" work among fallen women. Somehow I cannot help wondering whether Halliwell's respectability be not due to some ancestor who was too lazy to work and too cowardly to steal. To the grand army of working women I would say, Be not discouraged by such gross affronts, prompted by splenetic hearts and spewed forth by empty heads. You may be flouted on the one hand by a few purse-proud parvenues and pitied on the other hand by bedizened prostitutes, but the great world, which learned long