Some good has thereby been wrought. Employments suited to women, and hitherto closed to them, have now been thrown open; book-learning--too often a miserable system of cram, but perhaps better than nothing at all--has been placed within their reach. Public attention has been attracted to long-standing injustice; and considering the immense importance to the whole race of the full development of all the faculties of women, it was, and still is, to the interest of the public to give the fullest attention to the subject which it can manage to spare. Unfortunately the affair has another aspect which here closely concerns us. The over-eagerness with which some women have thrown themselves into the struggle for existence has in some quarters earned for the sex as a whole the reputation of possessing more self-feeling, less disinterestedness, and more sordidness of aim than men. It has been rashly assumed that because the pioneers of a movement have acted foolishly, because they have been injured in fighting a battle harder than any that will have to be fought by those for whom they prepare the way, all women are necessarily unfit for active life in the world. Alarm on the one side generates deleterious irritation on the other side. Faculties which might be devoted to the creditable performance of valuable work are dissipated in fighting for the privilege of doing the work at all. It should be remembered that those who have been starved always devour food with injurious avidity when it is at last brought within their reach, unless they are mercifully restrained by wise well-wishers. It cannot be doubted, however, that women who conscientiously perform their own special work in the world must have less strength at their disposal for other work than the majority of men. So far from this being to their discredit, the extreme importance of their own special functions ought to be more generally recognised. At the present time, the women who neglect their duties are apparently held in as much esteem as the women who render the State the highest possible service.