If men in their business were still using methods of a million years ago, they would need some exhortation too. It is marvellous that the same man who casts upon the scrap heap his most expensive machinery to replace it with still better, who constantly adjusts and readjusts his business to the latest demands of our rapidly changing time, can go home and contentedly endure the same petty difficulties which his father and his grandfather and all his receding ancestors endured in turn. The inadequacy of the home, the gross imperfections of its methods and management have anything but a helpful influence on men. Necessary difficulties are to be borne or overcome, but to suffer with a sickle when a steam reaper is to be had is contemptible rather than elevating. There will be some pathetic protest here that it is a man's duty to help woman bear the troubles and difficulties of the home. The woman ardently believes this, and the man too, sometimes. Of all incredible impositions this is the most astounding. Here we see half the human race, equally able with the other half (equal does not mean similar, remember!), content to see every industry on earth taken away from them, save house-service and child-culture, growing up in the full knowledge and acceptance of this field of labour, generally declining to study said industries before undertaking them, cheerfully undertaking them without any pretense of efficiency, and then calling upon the other half of the world, upon men, who do everything else that is done to maintain our civilisation, to help them do their work! We object to seeing the man harness the woman to the plough, and we are right. It is a poor way to work. A horse is more efficient, a steam-plough still better. It is time that we objected to the woman's effort to harness the man to the home, in all its cumbrous old-world inefficiencies. It is not more labour that the home wants, it is better machinery and administration. Some hold that the feebleness of woman has a beneficent effect on man, draws out many of his nobler qualities. He should then marry a bed-ridden invalid--a purblind idiot--and draw them all out! The essential weakness and deficiencies of the child are quite sufficient to call out all the strength and wisdom of both parents, without adding this travesty of childhood, this pretended helplessness of a full-grown woman. The shame of it! That a mother, one who needs every attainable height of wisdom and power, should forego her own human development--to make good her claim on man for food and clothes and draw out his nobler qualities! The virtue of parentage is to be measured by its success, not by the amount of effort and sacrifice expended.