2. _Status._--A still more important result of the industrial revolution is _the changed status of the wage-earner_. Here it appears to me that women have profited more than men. Broadly speaking, men, whatever their ultimate gain in wages, lost in status through the industrial revolution. The prospect of rising to be masters in their own trade, though not universal, was certainly very much greater under the domestic system of working with small capital than under the modern system of large concentrated capital. In this respect women did not lose in anything like the same proportion as did men, because they had very much less to lose. The number of women who could rise to be employers on their own account must have been small. No doubt a larger number lost the prospect of industrial partnership with their husbands in the joint management of a small business. But for women wage-earners the industrial revolution does mean a certain advance in status. The woman-worker in the great industry sells her work per piece or per hour, not her whole life and personality. I shall perhaps be told indignantly that the poor woman in a low-class factory or laundry is as veritable a drudge as the most oppressed serf of mediaeval times, and I do not attempt to deny it. But we are here discussing potential changes, not the actual conditions now in force. The drudgery performed by women under the great industry is of the nature of a survival, and results from the fact that women can still be got to work in such ways for very low wages. These conditions are largely the heritage of the past and can be changed and humanised whenever the women themselves or society acting collectively makes a sufficiently strong demand. Nor must it be forgotten that in modern industry women have a further advantage in being paid their own wages instead of being merely remunerated collectively in the family, as was often the case formerly. Modern industry thus holds for the woman-worker the possibility of a more dignified and self-respecting position than the domestic system of the near past.