The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and, in any case, it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man. It is very needful to impress this factor of constant change on our attention, and to fix it there. To ignore it, and it is too commonly ignored, is to falsify every issue. "The Hithertos," as Mr. Zangwill has aptly termed them, are helpless. Things are so, and we are carried on; and as yet we know not whither, and we are floundering not a little as we seek for a way. The women of one class have been forced into labour by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause; the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women's energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship--the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood. Let us consider for a moment the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life. There are, according to the estimate of labour experts, 5,000,000 women industrially employed in England. The important point to consider is that during the last sixty years the women who work are gaining numerically at a greater rate than men are. The average weekly wage paid is seven shillings. Nine-tenths of the sweated work of this country is done by women. I have no wish to give statistics of the wages in particular trades; these are readily accessible to all. Unfortunately the facts do not allow any exaggeration; they are saddening and horrible enough in themselves. The life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; is washed and ironed into our linen; wrought into the laces and embroideries, the feathers and flowers, the sham furs with which we other women bedeck ourselves; it is poured into our adulterated foods; it is pasted on our matches and pin-boxes; stuffed into our furniture and mattresses; and spent on the toys we buy for our children. The china that we use for our foods and the tins in which we cook them are damned with the lead-poison that we offer to women as the reward of labour.