The middle-class women of Europe have still so little share in the control of production that one cannot determine whether or not they have even awakened to the understanding that the fundamental condition of a universal life-enhancing issue of the woman movement must be new social conditions. One cannot yet predicate anything at all in regard to their desires to promote more humane labour conditions and a more just distribution of profit. Under the system now prevailing they must, like men, either conform to it or be destroyed economically. It is even so in public offices and similar fields of labour. Just as so many young men do, at the beginning of their career, a great number of women attempt to abolish the abuses and mitigate the formalism. But they meet such obstacles that, like the young men, they are obliged to abandon the effort; or they are compelled to give up the position whereby they win their scanty bread. In this way, principally, the work of women in the sphere of charitable activity has given to men the opportunity for a correct valuation of the social working power of woman. Men have then in a wider sphere than that of the family circle, so often overlooked by them, learned to appreciate feminine enthusiasm and capacity for organisation, energy and devotion, initiative and endurance. Innumerable men—from the soldiers up, who in the hospitals of the Crimea literally kissed Florence Nightingale’s shadow on the floor of the hospital ward—have learned in the last half century that life has become more kindly for them since social motherliness has obtained for itself a certain elbow-room. The more women lose their present fear of appearing, in coöperation with men, “womanly” impulsive, savage in face of injustice and cruelty, the more will they signify in that joint work where, at least to-day, they still have a more fortunate hand—the hand of the mother. And since a single fact is more convincing than a thousand words, so the facts gained in the social activity of woman have won, in later years, many men supporters of woman suffrage. The arguments derived from abstract right—however obvious they may be for every tax-paying, law-abiding woman—go to the rear to make way for the argument of “social utility.” Not only women themselves but men also refer now to what women have accomplished when they are allowed to work in the service of society; they point to the reforms which were retarded or bungled because women had no immediate influence there where appropriations were granted and laws were enacted. Especially significant for the reconciliation of the sexes is the joint social work of young people. The temperance cause or the education of the masses or socialism now brings together a host of young men and girls, who learn thereby that the social as well as the private life of labour gains in strength and wealth if men and women participate in it together. * * * * *