The underlying principle of this redistribution of activities is the common-sense principle that every unit in a society should do the work at hand for which it is best fitted. This principle explains every case. Where we find a man dusting, scrubbing and doing laundry work it is because he could find nothing more remunerative to do and could outbid the women applying for that particular task. Wherever we find a woman plastering, or keeping books, or driving a street-car, or managing a store or corporation, it is for the same reason. And this modern principle wholly ignores sex and looks only at the work to be done and at the comparative fitness of the male and female applicants for it. We are being taught by destiny that parasitism and dependence are no more essentials of the feminine than the brands and manacles which at one time most men wore were essentials of the masculine. It is not prophecy to say that, as more and more millions of women enter the industrial fields, these readjustments and redivisions, this absorption of some occupations by women and of other occupations by men, will go on apace. We may not like it; but we can no more stop it than we can stop the physical and mental development of woman, or the use of steam and electricity. The missionary work for Democracy done by the women already understanding the values of work will undoubtedly eventually reach the “exclusive,” most distinctly leisure class. Its influence is seen on every hand, among the girls and young women of the very well-to-do, in families where the daughters are still persuaded to remain idly at home against their own inclinations. Probably every woman earning her own living, who has associates among women more or less comfortably supported in idleness, and in restraint, by men, is envied by not a few of them, by all not hopelessly corrupted by laziness and caste. And eventually they will be following her example. As the number of educated, valuable women forced to work for a living increases, the number of the same kind of women voluntarily going to work will increase. And finally the richer women will be reached and impelled. Their yearning to do something will take tangible form. We may live to see the discontented, folly-chasing daughters of the rich stepping not down to, but up to a place beside the woman wage-earner, because they are sick and tired of having no sensible employment, tired of the pitiful wait for some man with the right qualifications of personal and pecuniary attractiveness; because they have sufficiently developed in intelligence to have not a theoretic but a practical envy of the joys of the woman who is absolute mistress of herself and is waiting for the right man only as a man now waits for the right woman.