of the taxpayers, and so is the whole of the cost of administering the Act. Practically all women feel the weight of taxation, yet here the men profit three times as much as the women, and by an extraordinary irony, the women who are selected to be left out of sickness benefit are the very women who are doing the admittedly womanly work of making a home, and nearly all women are left out of unemployment benefit. It is easy to see how these anomalies arise. It is not by any means easy to provide a remedy for them. One scheme, propounded by Mr. H. G. Wells, and with a few ardent supporters, is the State endowment of motherhood. If this were adopted, the individual man would be relieved of the necessity of providing for his child, and the individual woman would be relieved of her economic dependence on her husband. There has been markedly little support for this proposal as yet among women in England, although Ellen Key in Sweden is a warm advocate, seeing in it the opportunity of women to do their life-work well. So far as the scheme applies to women who have lost their husbands, there is a considerable measure of approval; it has sometimes been described as “boarding out children with their mothers,” and is, to a very limited and inadequate extent, actually practised by some Poor Law authorities. A small beginning, too, has been made in the maternity benefit, and now that it has been made payable to the mother, it may be considered a true experiment in the direction of endowment.