s comet returns, and what would be left for
it to see? Of all follies uttered on this subject, and they are many,
the cry, each sex for itself, is the wickedest and worst.

The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little
worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals
for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until
it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the
most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of
mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed,
we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's
proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by
depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer
instead?

The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all
our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent
and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied
to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean
nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may
be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he
may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert.
Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous
distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men
do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of
all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may
die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it.
These economic dependences and independences consist only in the
relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do
with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to
Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money--the
means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may
have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence
and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning
whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though
money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making
and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where
the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten.
The real politics, the real econom