be
allowed to work.'

And, taken between two fires, poor women are ready to shout at the top
of their voices, 'Save us from our friends as well as from our enemies!'
It is a fact that at a recent congress of Socialists an orator declared
himself in favour of the suppression of work for women.

But women do want to work, and many of them married, too. If what
husbands earn is not enough to maintain the family or keep it in
comfort, they are partners, and they wish to contribute to the revenue.

If they are not married, they want to support themselves or help to keep
aged parents. Many of them prefer their independence to matrimony, which
not uncommonly turns out to be about the hardest way for a woman to get
a living.

Women have a right to work as they have a right to live, and every work
which is suitable for women should be open to them. And when I see
Lancashire make girls work in the coal-mines I may ask, 'What work is
there that women cannot do?'

God forbid that I should be in favour of women working in the mines, but
this is not necessary. There are so many men who do a kind of work that
women should do, and could do just as well, if not better, that there
should be no question of any kind of work done by women which men could
do better.

The earth was meant to keep her children, and she would if everybody,
man or woman, was in his or her right place. The supply is all there and
all right, but it is its distribution which is all wrong. The same may
be said of work.

There should be in this world work for all and bread for all, men or
women, only the poor inhabitants of this globe have not yet been able to
obtain a proper division of the goods which they have inherited from
nature.

Thanks to the discoveries of science and the openings of new markets,
opportunities for work increase every day, but men and women are like
children in a room full of toys--they all make a rush for those which
tempt them most, and fight and die in order to obtain them. In the
presence of all the careers open to them, they rush toward the most easy
to follow or the most brilliant.

Agriculture is forsaken by men who prefer swaggering in towns with
top-hats and frock-coats, instead of imitating in their own country the
virile, valiant men of the new worlds who fell forests, reclaim the
land, and are the advanced pioneers of civilization. They prefer being
clerks or shop assistants.

Instead of taking a pickaxe, working a p