Other vast changes have, however, been made in the lives of women which no women or friends of women consciously strove for, which no one regarded as great reforms, which were, in fact, the unintended and unforeseen results of man’s invention and man’s commercial and financial enterprise, directed solely towards the increase of purchaseable commodities and the manipulation of these in markets; not by any means directed towards the improvement of the lives of women and the home, towards the easing of labour, or the increase of beauty, peace and health. With the introduction of machinery there came the usual talk about its lightening the lot of the worker and so forth, but when one reads the history of the first factories, of child-labour and monstrous hours of work, inhuman and foul conditions and vast fortunes made in a few months by exploitation and speculation, one is forced to recognise that the passing of work out of the home, and of the woman into the factory was accomplished without thought of social consequences, and that, of all creatures on earth, the women were the most helpless to resist this change, had they wished to do so. These, then, are the two great classes of revolution that have come over the lives of Englishwomen during the past hundred years. One blind, unintended, inexorable, whether for good or evil; the other fought and striven for with the highest idealism and devotion. Both wrong and disastrous in the eyes of some. Both, whether right or wrong, accomplishments, hard facts, which the sociologist must meet and either repeal or amend. The one thing he must not do is idly to bewail the revolution and refuse either to adapt persons to conditions or conditions to persons. Pathetic people lament the disappearance of the woman of a hundred years ago, and some reproach the present generation with being rude to its great-grandmother. But surely any great-grandmother of sense would not wish the twentieth-century man to be mated with a nineteenth-century woman. Even regarding women merely as complements to men, it is desirable that the wife should be of the same generation as the husband. And it is nothing short of cruelty to desire to see an early Victorian lady under modern conditions; it would be like nothing so much as the liberation of a cage-bred canary into a flock of ravenous starlings.