The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed, we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer instead? The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert. Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it. These economic dependences and independences consist only in the relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money--the means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten. The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply--the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their _real_ value, their strength or availableness for life.