Those who are intimate with the lives of poor people know how desperately hard on the women are the quick-coming children and the dreadful inadequacy of the money she gets for housekeeping. The increase in drugging as a preventive is a matter for very serious consideration. It is not only hard work and under-feeding that makes so many of our working women look old at thirty. The dissatisfaction that is caused by all the defects of housing is purely to the good. It is to be wished that the women would all strike against the vile houses and the antiquated and decrepit implements and arrangements. Unhappily the women, having known no other, are often sunk in indifference. When people criticise the “folly” of teaching girls to cook on convenient stoves and to housekeep under reasonable conditions, because everyone knows they never will have convenient stoves or reasonable conditions, and it will only make them dissatisfied, I for one hail this dissatisfaction as the one star of hope for the housewives of the future. For it is quite certain that if the women are not dissatisfied, the men never will be, and things will never improve. It is difficult to find the beginning of the vicious circle in which domestic affairs now are. You are no craftsman if you do not take pride and joy in your tools, and is it not mockery to ask the English cottager to take pride in her tools? Think of the crowded condition of the rooms, so that the Sunday clothes must be kept in the parlour, and there is no room whatever for storing perishable food, to say nothing of groceries! Think of the extravagant, ramshackle grates on which these women are expected to cook appetising food, without which the men will go to the public-house! Think of the washing on a wet day! The man gets out of the place as soon as ever he can, and we do not wonder nor blame him. It seems to me indecent to blame the woman if she succumbs to such conditions. When she revolts from them, she ought to have the hearty help and sympathy of every reformer in the land.