ere wearing them
they would be the only people wearing them. For powder and patches soon
went out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion. In the same
way, if women desert the family for the factory, they may find they have
only done it for a deserted factory. It would have been very unwise of
the lower orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in the
last days of the French monarchy. It would have been very laborious to
learn the science of heraldry or the tables of precedence when all such
things were at once most complicated and most moribund. It would be
tiresome to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag of tricks
was coming to an end. A French satirist might have written a fine
apologue about Jacques Bonhomme coming up to Paris in his wooden shoes
and demanding to be made Gold Stick in Waiting in the name of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity; but I fear the stick in waiting would be
waiting still.

One of the first topics on which I heard conversation turning in America
was that of a very interesting book called _Main Street_, which involves
many of these questions of the modern industrial and the eternal
feminine. It is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the
story, of a young married woman in one of the multitudinous little towns
on the great central plains of America; and of a sort of struggle
between her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity of
her neighbours. There are a number of true and telling suggestions in
the book, but the one touch which I found tingling in the memory of many
readers was the last sentence, in which the master of the house, with
unshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domestic
implement; I think it was a screw-driver. It seems to me a harmless
request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he
had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And a
great many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in which
she lived really was like a wooden coffin. But this appears to me to be
taking a somewhat funereal view of the life of humanity.

For, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is merely the life
of humanity, and even the life which all humanitarians have striven to
give to humanity. Revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal
but even as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to establish
this; revolutionary heroes have fought,