A certain type of man is never tired of boasting that this is a “man’s world” and that men have made it. They certainly have made many things, some good and some bad. But whatever they have made of the world, this type of man expects woman to be an impossible She,—impossible in the world he has chosen to make around her. This kind of man professes to admire beauty, peace, the amenities of life, and these are to be given him, if you please, by woman. He does not see that man has himself largely destroyed the beauty, peace and amenity of life. He has created the modern industrial system; he has taken women’s work out of the home; he has filled the air with smoke and clangour; he has polluted the rivers; he has based the growth of millions of pounds upon the destruction of millions of human bodies; he has driven the humane spirit out of his activities, and then he has called upon woman to maintain it alone. She cannot do it alone. It is not reasonable to expect women to be capable of what Whitman finely calls “sane, athletic motherhood,” in the midst of the noise and cruelty and dirt and meanness in which the daughters of the poor are reared, or of the futility and silliness to which so many of the daughters of the rich are heirs. Women may not have produced great works of art, but they are artists in life. They are often said to be nearer nature than men. Certainly they seem to have a keener sense of reality and of essentials. They can be the greatest inspiration, when they are intellectually alive, when they have joy and freedom. In families where the women’s movement has opened the doors and windows, one sees delightful specimens of young women: jolly girls, whose noble bodies and cheerful rosy faces and frank eyes make older women happy to look on. One sees good fellowship with men and honesty and lively intelligence. One sees even the older women, some of them, gladly leaving off playing the lady and joining in the fellowship of sexes, classes and ages. It is this genius for living that must be altogether liberated, and with it we shall see an immense liberation of the organising and governing power of women. The union of practicality and ideality, of which I have already spoken, must be used to its utmost. Women are less pompous and less wasteful than men. They “cut the cackle” and get to business sooner; I cannot conceive of a body of women tolerating the sort of thing that goes on in the House of Commons, where men are allowed to go on repeating themselves and other people, for interminable weary hours, what time they are lamenting the congestion of business. Women are not so much taken up with votes of thanks and compliments; vested interests are less their concern.