the country, the wives and daughters of the village shopkeepers think it beneath them to stand behind the counter, and are those of our city merchants, of our professional men, to condescend to the sordid employment?"
Yes, and for various reasons.
1st. There is nothing else that we can do.
2d. It requires much conscientiousness, accuracy, tact, taste, and prudence,—all eminently feminine characteristics.
3d. It is a peculiarly feminine employment because it needs little physical strength, and because the immense majority of retail purchasers are women.
4th. It now withdraws from the true fields of masculine effort an immense number of men who would otherwise be forced to add to the supplies and wealth of the community by agricultural and other productive enterprizes. Thus the community loses enormously in two ways: it is deprived, on the one hand, of an army of producers (the retail merchants and their clerks); and on the other it has to support an army of unproductive consumers,—the women who might, but do not, carry on the retail trade.
5th. While it is a vocation wholly suited to women, it is just in so far improper for men, taking them from their natural vocations, herding them together in towns and cities where they live unmarried on small salaries, shrink physically and mentally amid their effeminate surroundings, and degenerate morally through the lying and cheating they unblushingly practise, and the dissipation that is often the only excitement of their vacant hours.
Finally, it is to be remembered that by so much as we pay the retail traders and their clerks for doing expensively what we could do cheaply, by so much we deprive ourselves and our families of the comforts and luxuries of life and of its higher influences and pleasures as connected with education, with art, and with beneficence. Why can many of us not have the beautiful dresses and surroundings that our fastidious taste longs for? Because we cannot earn them. Why are the colleges shut against us? Because we cannot knock at their doors with half a million in our
