propriety of their so doing. Nor do
such women forfeit the esteem of society. Society as such is no longer
concerned chiefly with matters of pedigree, but more largely with the
question of prosperity. While it would be asserting too much to say
that the nineteenth century witnessed the iconoclastic shattering of
the old aristocratic ideals, nevertheless, while the woman of blood
maintains her rightful place in the select circles of society, the
door stands ajar for women who have no other claim for recognition
than that they have amassed fortunes, or inherited them, or are the
wives of wealthy men. However, they must not have clinging to them
the odor of their humble beginnings, if they rose from lowly walks of
life. The real test applied to them is not the test of breeding, which
relates to the past, but of gentility, which is the measure of the
present life.

Besides the women who managed large business interests in their own
names, the nineteenth century witnessed the advent of the business
woman in numerous lines of small trade. To name the various kinds of
business in which women are found making for themselves a sustenance
would be to give a list of the many lines of retail trade; but the
shopwoman of the earlier part of the nineteenth century is quite a
different person from the tradeswoman of the latter half. Instead of
a small, obscure shop, conducted in a hesitating, apologetic manner,
to-day women are as aggressive advertisers, make as fine displays
in their shops, and sustain the same business relations with the
wholesale dealers, as do the retail dealers of the other sex. Beyond
any peradventure, women have become a part of the business organism
of England, and are competing upon terms of equality with men for the
patronage of the public; and they have before them just as hopeful
prospects of amassing a competence for an easy and independent old
age.

Great as is the army of women who enrolled themselves in the ranks of
commerce and clerkship during the nineteenth century, they are in a
minority as compared with the greater host of industry,--the women who
are found in the factories, working upon the raw materials of human
comforts and luxuries, toiling unremittingly and often under hard
conditions for a mere pittance as compared with the value of their
products. In 1895 there were one hundred thousand women in England
holding membership in the various trade unions, and, besides these, a
far larger numbe