work, flowers, and jewellery at the Paris Exhibition, and ask whether, in order to return to this lamented, primitive simplicity, all the multitude of hands that wrought them—most of them women's hands too—are to fail because there is no demand for their skill? Already they are paid down to the starvation point, and to throw them out of employment is to devote them to death, or worse,—in my opinion as just a pretext of war as any that have lately set armies in motion. For a woman who is forced to live by hard labour, as is the case in those over-crowded poxmlations, has a right to her life; nay, more absolutely still, to a virtuous life.[1] The feminine love of ornament has created these industries; and in view of the suffering and demoralization it would cause to repress them, even if we could return to calico and homespun, we should be wicked to do it. But we never can. Woman's mission is to be beautiful, but, excepting the rich woman, hardly any of us can afford the beautiful dress we require to make us so. Instead, therefore, of deeming it a virtue to have as little of it as possible, we should rather insist on finding some way to earn money so that we could conscientiously buy all we need of these lovely things, and pay besides our poor foreign sisters a good price for making them. We could accomplish both of these ends, and be handsome ourselves while we made them happier, if, if we were only—Co-operative Housekeepers!
O that from the great book of human experience we could learn even one of its priceless lessons!
For just as every woman now keeps her own house, so in the beginning of society it is supposed that all men tilled their own land. To-day, however, we see only half of them engaged in agriculture, while in the centre of the cultivated domain the rest are engaged upon the vast
- ↑ Let me not be understood to say, however, that even the defence of womanly honour, though the most vital of any possible national interest, is a just cause of war as it is at present carried on. I am no believer in the precept of " doing evil that good may come." War seems to me wholly evil, and I hate it, because of all the hostile forces that work together for the degradation of women, it is the most rapidly and overwhelmingly ruinous.
