In households of moderate means, where a certain social status is kept up, where, for instance, a woman takes $500 a year out of $5000, while her husband dresses well on $200, when all expenses have been paid, there is money for little else; fixed charges, children, service, taxes, swallow up the rest. There is hardly anything left for books, barely for a circulating library; there is very little for the theater and for games; holidays are taken in hideous lodgings at the seaside because a comfortable bungalow costs too much. The money that should have provided the most important thing in human life, namely pleasure, is on the woman's back. In the lower classes the case is, in a way, still worse. I do not mean workmen's wives, for any old rag will serve the slaves,--but their daughters! Recently a coroner's inquest in Soho showed that a girl had practically starved herself to death to buy fine clothes, and it is not an isolated case. For the last eight years I have been investigating the condition of workwomen, and, so far as typists, manicurists, and tea-shop girls are concerned, I assert that their main object in leaving the homes where they are kept is to have money for smart clothes; they flood the labor market at blackleg prices, to buy finery and for no other reason. They go further: while making the necessary inquiries for my novel, _A Bed of Roses_, I scheduled the cases of about forty London prostitutes. In about twenty-five per cent of the cases the original cause, direct or contributory, was a desire for luxury which took the form of fine clothes. Now these women tell one what they think one would like to hear, and, where they scent sympathy, as much as possible attribute their fall to man's deceit. But acumen develops in the investigator; the figure of twenty-five per cent is correct or may even be an underestimate. The conclusion is that from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand women now on the streets of London have been brought there by a desire for self-adornment. Meanwhile there is no labor available for the poor consumer, because the energy of the dressmaker is diverted toward the rich; while Miss So-and-So is paid $4000 a year to design hats, the workwoman wears a man's cap rescued from the refuse heap.