Apart from the fact that, in most trades, women have made their appearance on the scene in the capacity of “blacklegs,” it must be admitted that there has been, on the side of men, something like resentment at the intrusion of women into professions or branches of industry which have been hitherto reserved to themselves. The expression by the men of this natural feeling--in the case of the doctors it was something more--has, as naturally, irritated the friends of those women who are seeking fresh means of employment; it has enabled them to appeal for sympathy and support from the public as against the “injustice” of men, and it has strengthened their determination to treat men, at all costs, as rivals and enemies who must be driven from their occupations by what I once heard one of these ladies describe, with more force than elegance, as “the cheaper animal.” To the onslaught of these shortsighted champions of the working woman’s cause, the men, with equal unwisdom, have retorted by raising, on every occasion, possible or impossible, the plea of “unfitness” as a bar to the treacherous encroachments of the opposite sex, and they have thus, in their turn, tried to win popular sympathy with their efforts to prevent the entrance of women into certain coveted employments, or to expel them from others in which they have already gained a footing. “Unfit!” Yes, undoubtedly, much labour at present performed by our women is unfit, if there is any fitness in our old and cherished ideal of home and of the place of the woman in the family; but, if we once enter on the line of restricting their employment by artificial barriers, it seems to me difficult to foresee the number and variety of the complications which would ensue. We may, however, freely concede that some interference may be necessary where, through the helplessness of the employed and the unscrupulousness of the employer, the health and well-being of future generations is jeopardised. In other words, certain restrictions on the labour of children and child-bearing women may be required by the interests of that society of which they are a part; further than this it seems scarcely wise to go in our demand for anything like legislative interference in respect to this matter of “unfitness.” The true remedy lies in the direction of the better organisation of the trades themselves. The same too may be said of the disastrous effect on the market of that increasing supply of cheap labour which is ever swelling to larger and larger proportions through the influx of our women. Instead of encouraging them to enter into competition with men, and by so doing to drag wages down to lower and yet lower levels, the task before us is to teach them that the interests of labour are one, and that wherever they enter a trade they must in self-protection refuse to sell their labour for less than a rate proportional to that demanded by their men.