worked well, it was fitted to survive; it was, at any rate, ‘true’ for the epoch wherein it did survive or flourish. On the other hand, a thing cannot be judged until it _is_ tried. It must be known by its results. There must be evolution, shifting, experiment. ‘The universe is always pursuing its adventures’; and truth is always ‘in the making,’—especially where the ‘thinking beings’ are getting to work. Which brings us to the application aforesaid. For assuredly among all the many ‘movements’ which have stirred the surface of the body politic during the last forty years, the so-called ‘woman’s movement’ may in its deeper aspects lay claim to the ‘pragmatic sanction.’ In it undoubtedly many thinking and adventurous persons have been at work. And there are passages in James’ book speaking of ‘our acts as the actual turning places in the great workshop of being where we catch truth in the making,’ to which the hearts of many of our modern women doctors and nurses will respond. On the other hand, the attitude of the many who at every stage have sought to oppose a professional career for women has never been more aptly summed up than in the words of the pragmatist: ‘They are simply afraid: afraid of more experience, afraid of life.’ A few years ago the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission published a weighty record of the usefulness of women in municipal work, suggesting further outlets for their energies; but the writers certainly did not foresee the astonishing influx of female labour into the many departments of public service consequent upon the exigencies of the present time. On the face of it we must own that some of these occupations seem little suited to the worker’s capacity. One can imagine the chorus of disapproval that would have risen from the ranks of the acutely feminine if such innovations as women postmen, ’bus conductors, and window-cleaners had offered themselves a few years ago. Even now it is probably only the most seasoned philosophers who regard them with perfect equanimity; the rest comfort themselves with the reflection that they are the unnatural products of an abnormal time: a sort of _epiphenomena_ thrown up from an underworld of chaos and destined to disappear again in the natural course of things. There is little doubt that this will be so in the end. Post delivery and window cleaning will scarcely become common occupations for girls any more than it will be usual for them to go into the trenches in the firing line, as some gallant Russian women have been doing in order to succour the starving Poles. All these things are exceptional, and exceptional things are generally the outcome of a strong emotion. As Professor Jebb has observed, ‘The feeling that covers a thousand square miles must, we instantly perceive, be a strong feeling.’ We have had many opportunities for such observation during the present war, but nowhere more emphatically than among women. In