d. That it has always been
so is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate.

Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field into which women have put their sickles was already
overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have obtained has
been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be supporting women.;
Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high tariff," "combination
of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what not, but if searching
for the cause of augmented poverty and crime, "industrial discontent"
and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically expounding it, we should
take some account of this enormous, sudden addition to the number of
workers seeking work. If any one thinks that within the brief period of
a generation the visible supply of labor can be enormously augmented
without profoundly affecting the stability of things and disastrously
touching the interests of wage-workers let no rude voice dispel his
dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous understanding may joy
to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung themselves in advocacy of
quack remedies for evils of which themselves are cause; it remains true
that when the contention of two lions for one bone is exacerbated by the
accession of a lioness the squabble is not composable by stirring up
some bears in the cage adjacent.

Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
good of her sex by foregoing needed employment in the hope that it may
fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This is a
world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman's
opportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as a
toad in a rock.

A marked demerit of the new order of things--the _regime_ of female
commercial service--is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race