t a woman capable of thinking but
has power by the simple force of example to lay the corner-stone of the
new temple, fairer than any yet known to mortal eyes. If there is doubt
for this generation of working-women toiling in blindest ignorance, it
rests with us to lessen the doubt for the next, and to make it
impossible in that better day for which we labor. Not one of us but can
ask, "What is the source of the income which gives me ease? Is it
possible for me to reconstruct my own life in such fashion that it shall
mean more direct and personal relation to the worker? How can I bring
more simplicity, less conventionality, more truth and right living into
home and every relation of life?"

I write these final words with all deference to the noble women whose
lives have been given to good work, and many of whom long ago settled
these questions practically for themselves. But for many of us there has
been simply passive acceptance of all present conditions, without a
question as to how or why they have come. It is because I believe that
with us is the power to remedy every one if we will, that I appeal to
women to-day. I write not as anarchist; not as declaimer against the
rights of property, but as believer in the full right to ownership of
all legitimately acquired property. I believe it the order of life, of
any life that would hold good work of whatever nature, that enough
should be acquired to make sharp want or eating care and perplexity
impossible. But it is certain that even for the most unselfish of us
there is an exaggerated estimate of the value of money,--an involuntary
and inevitable truckling to the one who has most,--and that, no matter
what our teaching may be, the force of every act and tendency makes
against it. And there can be no retracing of steps that have for
generations turned in the wrong direction. The very breath we draw on
this American soil is poisoned by the foulness about us, and about us by
our own act and choice. We have degraded labor till there is no lower
depth, and not one but many generations must pass before these masses
over whose condition we puzzle can find their feet in the path that
means any real progress.

Ask first, then, not what shall we do for these women, but what shall we
do for ourselves? How shall we learn to know what are the real things?
How shall we come to love them and cleave to them, and hold no life
worth living that admits sham or compromise, or believes the