nineteenth. Let us say, the ideal relation of man and woman is partnership-a partnership as nearly equal as may be, in which each in giving way hardly knows that he or she is yielding, for the compulsion is so reasonable and right. By that partnership civilisation has been constantly advanced. It has often been observed that men living alone feed like animals and live like hogs; women living alone live in decency but starve their bodies. If we are more dependent upon man for the necessaries of life, we are more dependent upon women for the decencies. The over-elaboration of our needs also comes to us from women, but that is an excess of their civilising zeala defect of their qualities. In such a partnership it will often happen that one will overreach the other; it may be the man, it may be the woman; who can say which more often filches the unjust share? Men ruin women, women ruin men. Neither sex is without sin that it should dare to throw a stone at the other.

In a beautiful age, when all nevertheless was not so beautiful as it seems to us, man invented the ideal of chivalry. Sir Almroth Wright, who seems to be incapable of defining any word as others conceive its meaning, defines chivalry as a compact, do ut des, facio ut facias. Could any definition be more false? The ideal of chivalry was that the strong should aid the weak, without reward and without price. The knighterrant, who roved the world defending the forlorn and the oppressed, did not demand payment even from those who could well afford it; his chivalry was its own sufficient recompense. But there are many women who have no chance of partnership with man, ideal or prosaic, fair or unfair, subject or predominant; no knowledge of any chivalry that will protect them, without payment claimed in return. It is fortunate for such women that they have in them arrhenoplasm' as well as thelyplasm.'* The arrhenoplasm, when evident in women, may offend our delicate sensibili

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*Arrheno male; thely female. According to Weininger, 'every single organ and every single cell possesses a sexuality lying somewhere between arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm; and further, every cell received an original sexual endowment different in kind and degree.' This hypothesis is said to have received some experimental corroboration from later workers.

ties; but so do many other things that are quite necessary in this work-a-day world.

We cannot neglect nature, but in this matter nature gives us no complete instruction; we cannot neglect history, but history changes as we watch it; we cannot neglect prejudice, a very useful thing, though apt to lag behind the times; we cannot neglect custom, more valuable to us than law, more plastic, more helpful, more tolerant, though, like law, it is a second-hand garment. But, above all, we cannot safely disregard facts. This fact refuses to be disregarded, that there are millions of women who have to earn their own livelihood, and must, for that reason, abandon their womanly seclusion. They must associate with men, they must compete with men, they must, in working hours at least, forget that they are women. This may be quite as difficult for them as it is for Sir Almroth Wright to forget that the physician whom he is invited to meet in consultation is a woman. But it is only one of the many difficulties they have to face. Whatever else is or may not be chivalry, it is not chivalrous to put any needless obstacle in the way of a woman who does not choose, or has not the chance, to depend on the 'bounty' of man.

Concerning this sex which is being forced by circumstances to abandon its natural partnership with man and seek its own. footing in the world, Sir Almroth has made a discovery. The women are insolvent; they do not pay their way; they should be grateful if they do not starve, still more if they live in ease or luxury-grateful to man, who 'makes' all the money. This sordid indictment is made for a political purpose, which we may neglect for the present to examine the charge.

In the first place, this notion of making money is crude and superficial; no one makes money; we acquire, we receive, we possess, we pay money; but our true solvency is to be reckoned, not by the margin of credit over debit in a banker's book, but by the excess value of the services we render over those which we receive. Judged by this standard there are many won who are insolvent, and there are also many men who are insolvent. Some of those who 'make' most money are most insolvent; their receipts are great and their services are null. To strike a balance between the sexes and to say that man gives more, woman receives more, or vice versa,

would require an exalted and impartial arbitrator free from all kinds of sex prejudice. A man cannot aspire to such impartiality; a woman cannot. Men and women are necessary to each other, necessary to civilisation, necessary to the race; and that is all that can be safely said.

But to return to money-that measure of commonplace. values. Can it be justly said that married women are insolvent? Though chivalry has no contractual element, marriage is a contract, a contract of partnership; it may also be a holy and mysterious sacrament, but it is a contract as well. The terms of that business contract are still much what they were when the marriage service was framed. The man endows the woman with all his worldly goods. An unequal contract, it may be said; but it is a contract sanctioned by the experience of ages, a contract into which no man enters blindfold or without consent. It is the normal function of the husband to win or acquire the money; it is the function of the wife to spend it. It is quite as difficult to spend money well as it is to make it. There are millions of women who do it well; there are many who do it badly; there are some who do it very badly-just as there are men who perform their manly functions ill. But whether the woman does her spending well or ill, she cannot be called insolvent while the partnership itself is solvent. A partner who is invited to join a firm is not called insolvent because he supplies no capital. To this firm the woman is always invited; she is never the postulant, though she may sometimes manoeuvre to be asked. Concern with finance belongs as much to those who manage money as to those who acquire it, and in the vast majority of cases the management of money falls to the wife, who is, as a rule, better fitted than the man to make a little go a long way. Married women cannot be called insolvent, unless by an abuse of terms.

Turn then to unmarried women, and first to those who have inherited money. These are insolvent, according to Sir Almroth, because they did not themselves make the money which they spend. This involves a new adjustment of our fixed ideas. No man will be solvent who did not 'make' the money which he spends. A very desirable state of affairs, it may be, but nothing short of a revolution will be required to bring it about. Sir Almroth hints that the House of

Peers was deprived of its last shred of authority over finance because the chief part of its members did not 'make' the money which they own. That is not true historically; whether it can be true in any esoteric sense, we may leave our readers to decide.

Then we come to the women who do earn their livelihood -they number millions. Surely they will be accounted solvent, if the Peers are not. No, says Sir Almroth; these ladies are insolvent because they earn so little. They may pay their own way, and save money, but they are insolvent, for they do not defray their full share of rates and taxes. It would be idle to tell Sir Almroth that the incidence of taxation is much too subtle and complicated a question to be settled by ascertaining who pays the taxes in the first instance he has not thought such matters worthy of his attention. If we could trace out the whole stress of the burden we might very likely find that these women pay more than their full share. But, by this reasoning, all men who earn less than a certain amount are insolvent and should be

deprived of their votes. New principles are invented at every turn in order to prove that women are insolvent and therefore should have no vote.

If the poverty of wage-earning women appears to Sir Almroth a reason why they should not vote, to many women it seems the most conclusive reason why the suffrage should be conceded. They believe that the possession of votes has been the cause and not merely the concomitant of the rise in men's wages. The subject is too obscure for dogmatic assertion, but instances can be found in which the men have attained results by the influence of their voting power which might not have been otherwise secured. Trade Unions have thus received privileges which any one of Sir Almroth's expert legislators-who ought no doubt to make our laws but do not-would have refused. The miners and the railway men have secured concessions by the benevolent interference of politicians not unmoved by an appetite for votes. But, since economic forces are stronger than legislation, more subtle than administrative ingenuity, more inexorable than custom, it may be worth while to consider the economic forces that are working chiefly against the women.

The first thing that is against the women is the rapid increase

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of competition among women. The superfluity of women increases; the marriage habit declines among men; the marriage profession becomes less popular among women. flood of women is let loose to struggle for the few occupations that are open to women. In this country, at least, women are not fit or are not considered fit for heavy manual and bodily labour. In the whole history of their sex women have never been machine makers. They have worked the loom, the spinning-wheel; they now work similar machines, and also the sewing-machine and the typewriter, but they have never made the instruments; they have not wielded the hammer, the saw, the chisel, or the file. Whether this be a true sex disability is not certain; it may be due to custom and tradition; but while the fact remains women are excluded from a great class of employments.

In the creative arts women seem to be inferior. The best woman is not so good a cook as the best man; the best tailors for women are men. There has been no sufficient cause for many hundreds of years why a woman should not paint pictures, draw, etch, model, design, compose music, poetry, literature of all kinds. Yet the examples of feminine excellence in these lines are rare; only in novel-writing can the women claim anything like an equality with men. Custom may have operated to diminish the competition of woman; that bar has now been removed; we may shortly be certain whether woman is intellectually and spiritually receptive rather than creative. But hitherto the highest prizes of the artistic career have only fallen-among women-to actresses, singers, and dancers.

In administration woman has not proved herself to be the equal of man. From many professions she is excluded by custom; she cannot in this country be a priest, a barrister or a solicitor. But there has been nothing to prevent her from opening a shop or an hotel and developing a great business. On a small scale-especially in France-a certain kind of administrative ability is very common among women, but woman has seldom operated on a large scale. Custom no doubt tells here also; the superior prestige of man weights the balance; man is unwilling to take orders from a woman, disinclined to do business with a woman; but it is reasonable to suppose that if the capacity of woman had been as great.