livelihood more precarious. The _Times_ in 1895 pointed out that there
were eight hundred and eighty thousand women affected by the Factories
and Workshops Bill, introduced into Parliament in that year. The
lack of flexibility of the measure, failing to take account of the
different natures and conditions of the various employments affected,
made it obviously unjust to the women employed in certain trades. Some
industries have their seasons of activity and of dulness, while others
fluctuate without regard to periods; and to class all such under
legislation regulating the hours of labor at the same number for them
all could but work injury to the women employed in such trades and
disproportionate advantage to other women employed in industries
pursued evenly throughout the year.

The crux of such contentions lies in the paternal attitude of the
state to the female sex. The expediency of depriving women of the same
amount of liberty to regulate their own affairs as is accorded to men
is a matter of doubt. Women feel that they can decide better for
their own needs than can the legislators who have as their guide only
industrial statistics, the petitions of well-meaning social reformers,
and the views of those who claim expert knowledge from the outside.
Just what will be the outcome of the attempt to resolve woman into a
normal relationship to modern industry without violation of the rights
of self-direction and protection, which she claims as her prerogative,
and at the same time to preserve society from the social blight of the
reduction of considerable numbers of workingwomen to prostitution
and abandoned living, remains to be determined by the wisdom and
experience of the twentieth century.

One of the most curious of the industrial problems at the front in the
nineteenth century was the servant question. While the wheels of work
were set to moving with more or less smoothness in all other ways,
this important wheel in the domestic machinery has never run without
friction, jarring to the nerves of housewives. Such women find a
common bond of sympathy in the incompetence and dereliction of their
domestics; domestics find a common subject of interest in their
grievances against their mistresses. The whole matter is almost
ludicrous, because it is one simply of adjustment. After the sex
has asserted for itself a position in the realm of industry not
inconsistent with the self-respect which it has sought to maintain,
t