Are there no other causes for women’s low wages? Let us see. Demand and Supply regulate wages, they say. Then anything that tends to restrict the field of labour wherein a group of persons may compete, lowers the wages of that group of persons. So long as by law women cannot be lawyers, chartered accountants, or clergymen of the Church of England; so long as, by administrative action, women are excluded from all the well-paid posts in the Civil Service, and married women tied out from teaching and the post office; so long as, by custom and the action of men’s trade unions, women are either directly refused admission into trades or indirectly refused by being denied apprenticeship; so long as all these artificial restrictions of women’s labour exist, will the supply of women’s labour in other directions be artificially increased and their wages lowered. So at the present day it is by no means true to say that wages are determined by Supply and Demand acting without restriction; Supply and Demand are artificially affected by all sorts of forces, not least of these being political forces, which have established fair wages clauses for men in Government employ, and are establishing trade-boards for many of the sweated industries in which women were the victims. We abandoned the principle of _laissez-faire_ some half a century ago, and most of us have no desire to return to it, for under a system of absolutely free industrial competition, women must go under. But what we do desire is that protection shall be given to women in ways that will help them and not in ways that hinder them, and that wage-earning employments shall not be taken away from them without any equivalent. Experience has shown that men alone cannot be trusted to judge of women’s employment fairly. A gentleman is shocked to see a woman with her face covered with coal dust; but it is healthier to have coal dust on your face than cotton or lead dust in your lungs. They do not like to see a woman tip a coal waggon with a twist of her loins; they do not watch the overdone mother of a family carrying water up and down steep stairs on the eve of her confinement or a week or two after it. Three times has Parliament been invited to put a stop to the employment of women at the pit-brow, all for their good, of course. And the reason given is that it is bad for their health. The country was scoured to find a doctor or a nurse who would give evidence of cases of strain or injury, but all they found was evidence that consumptive girls from the cotton mills became robust and healthy at the pit-brow. The climax of absurdity was reached when gentlemen of the House of Commons pleaded that the women ought to be protected from hearing the bad language of the colliers. As if these same colliers spoke, in the home, quite a different, and only a parliamentary, language! And as if, when you come to think of it, a man’s right to swear were a more precious thing than a woman’s right to work! The fact is