ty and of character as permitted the women to look with
complacency upon women bred in other ways. They experienced no
humiliating contrasts. Their household drudgery put within their reach
the full civilization of which it was an organic part. But who can
affirm as much of their household drudgery to-day? Who can pretend that
the best accomplishment of it on middle-class lines admits the cottage
woman into the full advantages of middle-class civilization, and enables
her to look without humiliation upon the accomplishments of well-to-do
women? I know that villa ladies and district visitors cling to some such
belief, but the notion is false, and may be dismissed without argument,
until the ladies can show that they owe all their own refinement to the
inspiring influences of the washing-tub, and the scrubbing-pail, and the
kitchen-range. The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead of
setting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and
body, has side-tracked them--has made of them charwomen and laundresses,
so that other women may shirk these duties and be "cultured."

Of course, their wage-earning and their home-work are not the only
sources from which ideas that would explain and beautify life might be
obtained by them. The other sources, however, are of no great value. At
school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general
information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework
and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish
lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually
most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and
that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of
thought and taste going on elsewhere in the house, but they are not
admitted to it. Afterwards, marrying, and confronted with the problem of
making both ends meet on eighteen shillings a week, they get experience
indeed of many things, and, becoming mothers, they learn invaluable
lessons; yet still the _savoir vivre_ that should make up for the old
peasant cult, the happy outlook, the inspiring point of view, is not
attained. Their best chance is in the ideas and knowledge they may pick
up from their husbands, and if from them they do not learn anything of
the best that has been thought and said in the world, they do not learn
it. Of their husbands, in this connection, there will be something
further to be said pres