not wish with all his heart and both his
hands to relieve them--is a fool.

EMANCIPATED WOMAN

WHAT I should like to know is, how "the enlargement of woman's sphere"
by entrance into the various activities of commercial, professional and
industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfy
her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must work
in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men." But who
filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there then
disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been no
time in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemious
male workers--was not in excess of the demand. That it has always been
so is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate.

Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field, then, into which women have put their sickles was
already overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have
obtained has been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be
supporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high
tariff," "combination of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what
not, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime,
"industrial discontent," and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically
expounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, sudden
addition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that
within the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor can
be enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of
things and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers, let no
rude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils for which they
themselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two
lions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the
squabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage
adjacent.

Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
good of her sex by refusing needed employment in the hope that it
may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's da