The clamour raised by those who have taken this line of extreme reaction has retarded the advance of public opinion in the direction of practical and needed reform, and has gravely hampered the efforts of those who have striven to arouse public interest in the attempt to better the position of women in various fields of labour. People have, not unnaturally, been alarmed by what seems to many the absurd suggestion of equality between the sexes, and, shrinking from the assertion of such principles, have adopted an attitude of hostility to the just claims of women for consideration in respect of their labour and wages, their education, the protection of their earnings and property, the removal of such trade and professional restrictions as are of an artificial character, and the opening out to them of wider means of obtaining a livelihood. In view of the responsibilities and duties which society now imposes on women, changes in the direction of these reforms are not only reasonable but necessary in the common interest. To insist, however, that such reforms shall under no circumstances take account of the differences of sex is to fight against indisputable facts which must, in the end, prove too strong for us. There is no danger to society in the recognition of equal human rights for both sexes, if we are also ready to recognise the divergence of their capabilities, for the relations of men and women to each other, their functions in the family and the state, must ultimately be determined--however ill it may please the more ardent female reformer--by the operation of natural laws. If we attempt to ignore these laws we are at once landed in a sea of difficulties. Take this very question of “Women’s Work.” At the outset we are brought face to face with facts that show us that all employments are not equally suitable to men and women. We find that, in the case of mothers at least, there are many occupations for which they are wholly unfit, but in which men may engage with impunity. Day after day we find child-bearing women compelled to labour after a fashion for which they are temporarily unfit, and which is not only the frequent cause of permanent injury to their own health, but entails a heritage of disease, or of that feeble health which falls a ready prey to disease, on all their offspring. I have seen many married women who were habitually employed in handling white lead, and in but two instances has my question as to the health of their children been satisfactorily answered; whilst in certain branches of the potters’ trade the employment of the mother not unfrequently means the death of her children in their early infancy. Even where the employment is not in itself unhealthy, its pursuit, regardless of the claims of the family--as in the case where working mothers leave their little ones at the gate of the factory to a stranger’s care--has to be paid for by a high percentage of infant mortality.