It is true that millions of these women in later life have the intelligence to realize the mistake they have made, and to measure with some approach to accuracy the deterioration it has effected both in their minds and in their bodies in one generation. It would be too much, perhaps, to expect young girls to anticipate these results, when they first leave their homes to earn their own livelihood; but what leaves one marvelling is the fact that the older elements in the population do not seem to understand the doom which will inevitably overtake this female army and its descendants, and that far from making any attempt at driving it back, they shout vociferously and applaud it as a desirable and excellent phenomenon of modern life. The cynic may reply “All the better! You say that 200 years of commercial, industrial and office occupations have deteriorated man, so that modern woman has very naturally learnt to despise him. Very well, then, if women now suffer a similar amount of deterioration, the balance will once more be restored, and all will be well.” All those who can derive some comfort from this reflection, in the face of modern tendencies, are welcome to it. But to those who, like myself, realize that hitherto the rapidity of our degeneration has been to some extent checked by the comparative aloofness of one sex from the worst influences of modern civilization, and that henceforth, instead of one stream of degeneration we shall have two which will become confluent at marriage, the future does not seem to be a very bright one, nor does it hold out any promise of producing, from the human elements it will contain, the individuals capable of initiating a counter movement sufficiently powerful to arrest the tide of degeneracy that threatens to sweep everything of value away. With regard to the fund-holding wealthy spinster, it may be taken as a general rule that she cannot fail to be anything else than a burden to the community to which she belongs. She is not only a cul-de-sac, or a blind-alley of the stream of Life, where the forces that have produced her come to a dead stop, but she is also the means of damming up a portion of the community’s wealth in produce and labour in that cul-de-sac. She herself, her household expenditure, her retinue, and her disbursements for humanitarian and religious objects, exact a toll on the community, very little of which is substantially helpful to the fluency or security of the stream of Life.