Mr. J. Swinburne, a very gifted engineer, in a sensational paper read not long ago before the Musical Association, poked a great deal of good-humoured fun at the claims of women to equal consideration with men. Though “Women in Music” was the title of his paper, he surveyed generally the performances of women in every kind of activity and came to an unfavourable conclusion. One of his criticisms was that women’s minds are almost wholly receptive and hardly at all productive. They were not, he urged, originators of ideas or systems, neither leaders of thought, inventors or captains of industry. In his view, the great impulses which really drive round the wheels of civilisation have always been and always will be virile. So far as the past is concerned, this is certainly true, but it is questionable whether it is necessarily true of the future. The truth is that women are some centuries behindhand in experience of public activity, and this deficiency cannot quickly be made up. But the good Englishwoman will hardly go forward into the future with any damaging assumptions on her back: she will rather dump them by the roadside and press on, acknowledging a somewhat light equipment for her journey, but trusting to capacities in her knapsack to the possibilities of which she will confess no limits. Englishwomen are excellent employees: they are more docile than men and less lazy by nature. Men are far more critical of their employers and every man, no matter how well suited to him his employment may be, faces his daily task with a certain spirit of rebellion. Having greater activity of mind and body than a woman, he is always distracted by the idea that he might be spending his time more profitably, or at least more agreeably. On the other hand, men are more methodical, and less at the mercy of their emotions when at work. Mary the housemaid runs upstairs at such a pace that she is speechless by the time she reaches the top, and Eliza the cook, if she has had a “few words” or her young man has been faithless, will produce pastry that is uneatable. Men do not run upstairs, and they leave their hearts outside the office with their overcoats, transforming themselves with ease into part of an impersonal machine from which they completely detach themselves at night with the same nonchalance. Mr Swinburne asserts that women take their work too seriously, as if that were a fault: the real fault is that they are apt to brood over it in their leisure hours, thus robbing the mind of its relaxation. Englishwomen might learn of Englishmen a habit of greater attention to themselves as machines.