own life, the results cannot be satisfactory. Reactions that are
sought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirations
and mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just as
they would be if men should seek a similar distortion. The remedy is to
let the woman's mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just as
the man's always has done. Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, their
exercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be released
from the constraint that is now pinching them and pinning them down and
will bud and blossom and grow up to normal and valuable fruition.

We have started with the fact that the reading done by the members of
women's clubs, especially in connection with club papers, is often
trivial, superficial, devoid of intelligence and lacking in judgment.
Treating this as a symptom; we have, I think, traced the cause to a total
lack of interest due to arbitrary, perfunctory and unintelligent
programme-making. The disease may be diagnosed, I think, as acute
programitis and the physician is in a position to consider what
therapeutic measures may be indicated. We shall endeavor to prescribe some
simple remedies.

III--_The Remedy_

When we have once discovered the cause of a malady, we may proceed in two
ways to combat it; either we may destroy the cause or we may render the
possible victims immune. To put it a little differently, we may eliminate
either of the two elements whose conjunction causes the disease. To grow
weeds, there must co-exist their seeds and a favourable soil. They may be
exterminated either by killing the seeds or sterilising the soil. Either
of these methods may be used in dealing with the disease that prevails
among readers, or, if you prefer the other metaphor, with the rank
vegetation that has choked the fertile soil of their minds, making any
legitimate mental crop impossible. We have seen that the conditions
favorable to the disease are a lack of interest and a fallacious idea that
there is something inherent in the printed page _per se_ that makes its
perusal valuable whether the reader is interested or not--somewhat as a
charm is supposed to work even when it is in a language that the user does
not understand.

We are considering only the form of the disease that affects clubwomen,
and this we have diagnosed as _programitis_--the imposition of a set
programme of work--which, as an exciting cause, operates on