it there. To ignore it, and it is too commonly ignored, is
to falsify every issue. "The Hithertos," as Mr. Zangwill has aptly
termed them, are helpless. Things are so, and we are carried on; and
as yet we know not whither, and we are floundering not a little as we
seek for a way. The women of one class have been forced into labour by
the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have
arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an
entirely different cause; the no less bitter driving of an
unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of
women's energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a
life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at
all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women
who have none there is this common kinship--the wastage not so much of
woman as of womanhood.

Let us consider for a moment the women who have been forced into the
cheating, damning struggle for life. There are, according to the
estimate of labour experts, 5,000,000 women industrially employed in
England. The important point to consider is that during the last sixty
years the women who work are gaining numerically at a greater rate
than men are. The average weekly wage paid is seven shillings.
Nine-tenths of the sweated work of this country is done by women. I
have no wish to give statistics of the wages in particular trades;
these are readily accessible to all. Unfortunately the facts do not
allow any exaggeration; they are saddening and horrible enough in
themselves. The life-blood of women, that should be given to the race,
is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; is washed and ironed
into our linen; wrought into the laces and embroideries, the feathers
and flowers, the sham furs with which we other women bedeck ourselves;
it is poured into our adulterated foods; it is pasted on our matches
and pin-boxes; stuffed into our furniture and mattresses; and spent on
the toys we buy for our children. The china that we use for our foods
and the tins in which we cook them are damned with the lead-poison
that we offer to women as the reward of labour.

It is these wrongs that the mothers with the fathers of the race have
to think out the way to alter. There is no one among us who is
guiltless in this matter. Things that are continuously wrong need
revolutionising, and not patching up.

What, then, is the real cause of the lownes