taste
corrupted by floods of the cheap and tawdry. Germany has been steadily
educating us to demand quantity, quantity mountains high. There is
promise that the doll at least will be rescued by France and made worth
the child's devotion.

In industry, as well as in all else, one feels that in France there has
not been so much a revolution as an orderly development. Women were in
munition factories even before the war, the number has merely swelled.
The women of the upper and lower bourgeois class always knew their
husband's business, the one could manage the shop, the other could
bargain with the best of them as to contracts and output. Women were
trained as bookkeepers and clerks under Napoleon I; he wanted men as
soldiers, and so decreed women should go into business. And the woman of
the aristocratic class has merely slipped out of her seclusion as if
putting aside an old-fashioned garment, and now carries on her
philanthropies in more serious and cooerdinated manner. We know the
practical business experience possessed by French women, and so are
prepared to learn that many a big commercial enterprise, the owner
having gone to the front, is now directed by his capable wife. That is
but a development, too, is it not? For we had all heard long ago of Mme.
Duval, even if we had not eaten at her restaurants, and though we had
never bought a ribbon or a carpet at the Bon Marche, we had heard of the
woman who helped break through old merchant habits and gave the world
the department store.

But nothing has been more significant in its growth during the war than
the small enterprises in which the husband and wife in the domestic
munition shop, laboring side by side with a little group of assistants,
have been turning out marvels of skill. The man is now in the trenches
fighting for France, and the woman takes command and leads the
industrial battalion to victory. She knows she fights for France.

A word more about her business, for she is playing an economic part that
brings us up at attention. She may be solving the problem of adjustment
of home and work so puzzling to women. There are just such domestic
shops dotted all over the map of France; in the Paris district alone
there are over eighteen hundred of them. The conditions are so
excellent and the ruling wages so high, that the minimum wage law passed
in 1915 applied only to the sweated home workers in the clothing trade,
and not to the domestic munition shops.

A