very leaf, in
every sweeping down and rippling wave: and they will be able to invent
graceful and economical dresses for themselves, without importing tawdry
and expensive ugliness from France.

Let me now go a step further, and ask you to consider this.--There are in
England now a vast number, and an increasing number, of young women who,
from various circumstances which we all know, must in after life be
either the mistresses of their own fortunes, or the earners of their own
bread. And, to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less women
of business; and to be women of business, they must know something of the
meaning of the words capital, profit, price, value, labour, wages, and of
the relation between those two last. In a word, they must know a little
political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of every
household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift of brain;
freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds, all of which eat
out the health as well as the heart, by a little sound knowledge of the
principles of political economy.

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually
buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and employing
labour in the form of servants; and very often, into the bargain, keeping
her husband's accounts: I cannot but think that her hard-worked brain
might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire to do her duty by every
subject in her little kingdom, might be more easily satisfied, had she
read something of what Mr. John Stuart Mill has written, especially on
the duties of employer and employed. A capitalist, a commercialist, an
employer of labour, and an accountant--every mistress of a household is
all these, whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for
her, in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust
merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate power of
ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly through their
work in simpler and less civilised societies.

And here I stop to answer those who may say--as I have heard it said--That
a woman's intellect is not fit for business; that when a woman takes to
business, she is apt to do it ill, and unpleasantly likewise; to be more
suspicious, more irritable, more grasping, more unreasonable, than
regular men of business would be; that--as I have heard it put--"a woman
does not fight fair." The answer is sim