structure.  If women must serve in shops, demand and care for it that it shall be in a less mixed, a more shielded way than now.  The great caravansaries of trade are perilous by their throng, publicity, and weariness.  There used to be women’s shops; choice places, where a woman’s care and taste had ruled before the counters were spread; where women could quietly purchase things that were sure to be beautiful or of good service; there were not the tumult and ransacking that kill both shop-girl and shopper now.

This is one instance, and but one, of the rescuing that ought to be attempted.  There ought at least to be distinct women’s departments, presided over by women of good, motherly tone and character, in the places of business which women so frequent, and where the thoughtful are aware of much that makes them tremble.  And surely a great many of the girls and women who choose shop-work, because they like its excitement, ought rather to be in homes, rendering womanly service, and preparing to serve in homes of their own—­leaving their present places to young men who might perhaps begin so to earn the homes to offer them.  Will not this apply all the way up, into the arts and the professions even?  There must needs be exceptional women perhaps; there are, and will be, time and errand and place for them; but Heaven forbid that they should all become exceptional.

Once more, work for these things that are behind, and underlie; believing that woman’s place is behind and within, not of repression, but of power; and that if she do not fill this place it will be empty; there will be no main spring.  Meanwhile she will get her rights as she rises to them, and her defenses where she needs them; everything that helps, defends, uplifts the woman uplifts man and the whole fabric, and man has begun to find it out.  If he “will give the suffrage if women want it,” as is said, why shall he not as well give them the things that they want suffrage for and that they are capable of representing?  Believe me, this work, and the representation which grows out of it, can no longer be done if we attempt the handling of political machinery—­the making of platforms, the judging of candidates, the measuring and disputation of party plans and issues, and all the tortuous following up of public and personal political history.

Do you say, men have their individual work in the world, and all this beside and of it, and that therefore we may?  Exactly here comes in again the law of the interior.  Their work is “of it”—­falls in the way.  They rub against it as they go along.  Men meet each other in the business thoroughfares, at the offices and the street corners; we are in the dear depths of home.  We are with the little ones, of whom is not this kingdom, but the kingdom of heaven, which we, through them, may help to come.  This is just where we must abandon our work, if we attempt the doing of theirs.  And here is