The emigration to America has left an enormous surplus of women in Europe. In England, for instance, the women stand in the proportion of sixteen to fifteen to the men. In some parts of Italy there are cities, it is said, where all the able-bodied men have left the country and gone to America. The changes brought by emigration have not, on the whole, it seems to me, affected the life of women favourably. But the same thing is true with regard to the changes brought about by the growth of cities and the use of machinery. Men have profited by the use of machinery more than women. The machines have taken away from the women the occupations they had in the homes, and this has driven them to take up other forms of labour, of more or less temporary character, in which they are overworked and underpaid. Everywhere we find the women in Europe either doing the obsolete things or performing some form of unskilled labour. For example, there are still one hundred thousand people, mostly women, in East London, it is said, who are engaged in home industries--in other words, sweating their lives away in crowded garrets trying to compete with machinery and organization in the making of clothes or artificial flowers, and in other kinds of work of this same general description. The movement for women's suffrage in England, which began in the upper classes among the women of the West End, has got down, to some extent, to the lower levels among the women who work with the hands. Women's suffrage meetings have been held, I have learned, in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. But I do not believe that voting alone will improve the condition of workingwomen. There must be a new distribution of the occupations. Too many women in Europe are performing a kind of labour for which they are not naturally fitted and for which they have had no special training. There are too many women in the ranks of unskilled labour. My own conviction is that what the workingwomen of Europe need most is a kind of education that will lift a larger number of them into the ranks of skilled labour--that will teach them to do something, and to do that something well. The Negro women in America have a great advantage in this respect. They are everywhere admitted to the same schools to which the men are admitted. All the Negro colleges are crowded with women. They are admitted to the industrial schools and to training in the different trades on the same terms as men. One of the chief practical results of the agitation for the suffrage in Europe will be, I imagine, to turn the attention of the women in the upper classes to the needs of the women in the lower classes. In Europe there is much work for women among their own sex, for, as I have said elsewhere, in Europe the man farthest down is woman. CHAPTER XVII THE ORGANIZATION OF COUNTRY LIFE IN DENMARK