If we have correctly stated the peculiar mental attitude and physical condition of the unmarried woman in our midst, and from this statement have drawn the correct inferences concerning her influence upon the community, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that permanently unmarried females are on the whole an element in society which cannot be regarded as very desirable. For it is above all important to remember this—that even if we have been wrong in our enumeration of the occupations that spinsters can properly and usefully fill, and even if the list we have given may be materially increased, the fact that the spinster is usefully occupied does not remove the principal feature of her condition which exerts an abnormal influence on society, that is to say, her radical and inevitable abnormality both of mind and body. Even if we have been wrong in our deductions concerning the heightening of the economic struggle through the presence of spinsters in excessive numbers in the professions, commerce, industry and trade, this principal objection still stands, and it leaves us no alternative but to consider means and ways of mitigating it. The fact that in Great Britain the number of surplus females—that is to say, of women who, all things being equal, cannot possibly marry—amounts to 2,000,000 or about 5 per cent. of the population, makes the problem of the old maid so acute, for this nation at least, that it is impossible not to regard it as perhaps the gravest with which legislators have to deal. For, on this basis alone, that it is the business of every government to secure the maximum amount of successful adaptation to the governed, the question appears to be one which legislators can hardly shelve with impunity. Of these 2,000,000 surplus women, it may be only just—humiliating as the argument may be to our national pride—to argue that possibly half are negative; that is to say, that 1,000,000 are so constituted as to be undisturbed by their semi-moribund sex-instincts, and that a sexless life is not merely tolerable but actually necessary to them. These may possibly achieve contentedness by means of suitable work combined with strong Christian influence. It is conceivable that they may even succeed in wholly sublimating their reproductive instincts. There still remain, however, the 1,000,000 spinsters, or 2½ per cent. of the population, whose resistance to sublimating influences is likely to be stubborn, and whose misery is likely to be proportionately greater—not to mention the unhappiness they must inevitably bring, directly upon those about them, and indirectly upon the nation at large.