Many of these gentlewomen lose their health in their struggle to obtain good food, decent lodging, and a neat appearance on Government salaries, knowing full well that the moment they fall out of the ranks numbers will be waiting to fill their places. And in the meantime enlightened authors and politicians write articles, and make speeches, holding forth upon the charm and beauty of the Home Woman, and drawing unflattering comparisons between her and the worker. Comfortable elderly gentlemen, who have had successful careers and can now afford to dine unwisely every night, and keep their daughters in well-dressed indolence, self-satisfied, self-aggrandising, self-advertising young politicians, who, having obtained an attentive public, delight to cant about the rights of the citizen and the good of the Empire, clever, intuitive, charming novelists, who apparently possess an unaccountable vein of dense non-comprehension on some points—all harp upon this theme of the Home Woman, and the Home Sphere, and the infinite superiority, in their own lordly eyes, of the gentle, domesticated scion of the family hearth. As if one-fourth of the women wage-earners, gentle or otherwise, in England today had any choice in the matter whatever. The rapidity with which a vacant place in the ranks is filled and the numbers waiting for it is surely sufficient proof of that; to say nothing of the pitiful conditions under which many, gentle and otherwise, cling to their posts long after a merciful fate should have given them the opportunity to save the remnants of their shattered health amidst country breezes. It is useless to cry out to the woman that work and competition with men is unbecoming to her. She _must_ work, and she _must_ compete, and seeing this, it is surely time the British Government accepted the fact magnanimously, and took more definite steps to assure her welfare. If it can only be done through woman’s suffrage, then woman’s suffrage must surely come, because, whether British legislators care for the good of women or not, nature does care, and as the race moves forward the working woman will have to be protected. It has been seen over and over again that no band of politicians, nor powerful men, nor tape-bound State can long defy any advancing good for the needs of the whole. Whether women work or not, they are the mothers of the future; and because this fact is greater than the sum of all other facts brought forward by the narrowness and short-sightedness of men, we may safely believe that, since they _must_ work, nature will see to it that they work under the most favourable conditions, no matter what rich men have to go the poorer for it. Pity is that the hour is so delayed; that narrowness, and selfishness, and self-aggrandisement still flourish, to the eternal cost of those of England’s mothers who bring weaklings into the world, through the hard conditions of their enforced labour.