with regard to the best means of advancing it. I therefore
venture to submit some thoughts on that subject. To my mind the
BREAD problem lies at the base of all the desirable and practical
reforms which our age meditates. Not that bread is intrinsically
more important to man than Temperance, Intelligence, Morality,
and Religion, but that it is essential to the just appreciation
of all these. Vainly do we preach the blessings of temperance to
human beings cradled in hunger, and suffering at intervals the
agonies of famine; idly do we commend intellectual culture to
those whose minds are daily racked with the dark problem, "How
shall we procure food for the morrow?" Morality, religion, are
but words to him who fishes in the gutters for the means of
sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for
shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter's night.

Before all questions of intellectual training or political
franchises for women, not to speak of such a trifle as costume,
do I place the question of enlarged opportunities for work; of a
more extended and diversified field of employment. The silk
culture and manufacture firmly established and thriftily
prosecuted to the extent of our home demand for silk, would be
worth everything to American women. Our now feeble and infantile
schools of design should be encouraged with the same view. A
wider and more prosperous development of our Manufacturing
Industry will increase the demand for female labor, thus
enhancing its average reward and elevating the social position of
woman. I trust the future has, therefore, much good in store for
the less muscular half of the human race.

But the reform here anticipated should be inaugurated in our own
households. I know how idle is the expectation of any general and
permanent enhancement of the wages of any class or condition
above the level of equation of Supply and Demand; yet it seems to
me that the friends of woman's rights may wisely and worthily set
the example of paying juster prices for female assistance in
their households than those now current. If they would but
resolve never to pay a capable, efficient woman less than
two-thirds the wages paid to a vigorous, effective man employed
in some corresponding vocation, they would very essentiall