and wages than I need
to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me
from the field." If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke it
out by coining the sweat of his workwomen into nickels I've nothing to
say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, "I cheat to eat." I do not
know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the
worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl and the owling eagle, approves the
needy man of prey and makes a place for him at table.

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is
a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the wisdom
of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody is
altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying workmen
in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent seamen. To
oppress one's own workmen, and provide for the workmen of a neighbor--to
skin those in charge of one's own interests while cottoning and oiling
the residuary product of another's skinnery--that is not very good
benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in place of both. The
man who eats _pate de fois gras_ in the sweat of his girl cashier's
face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his typewriter may
have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably satisfactory
specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in his own
home--a fairly good one--he may enjoy and merit that highest and most
honorable title on the scroll of woman's favor, "a good provider." One
having a claim to that glittering distinction should enjoy immunity from
the coarse and troublesome question, "From whose backs and bellies do
you provide?"

So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral results?
One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not and
can not know--to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality is
inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish,
book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that
hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have lived
out of the old _regime_ into the new would testify in this matter there
would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform-ladies.
Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were in
the "dark backward and absym of time," but something of the moral
distance between even so free-running a cre