hapless band.  The subject concerns all of us who have to work, all who have to provide for our families; it concerns every woman who has daughters:  it concerns the girls themselves to such a degree that, if they knew or suspected the dangers before them they would cry aloud for prevention, they would rebel, they would strike the Fifth Commandment out of the Tables.  So great, so terrible, are the dangers before them.

The absolute duty of teaching girls who may at some future time have to depend upon themselves some trade, calling or profession, seems a mere axiom, a thing which cannot be disputed or denied.  Yet it has not even begun to be practised.  If any thought is taken at all of this contingency, ‘general intelligence’ is still relied upon.  There are, however, other ways of facing the future.

In France, as everybody knows, no girl born of respectable parents is unprovided with a dot; there is no family, however poor, which does not strive and save in order to find their daughter some kind of dot.  If she has no dot, she remains unmarried.  The amount of the dot is determined by the social position of the parents.  No marriage is arranged without the dot forming an important part of the business.  No bride goes empty-handed out of her father’s house.  And since families in France are much smaller than in this country, a much smaller proportion of girls go unmarried.

In this country no girls of the lower class, and few of the middle class, ever have any dot at all.  They go to their husbands empty-handed, unless, as sometimes happens, the father makes an allowance to the daughter.  All they have is their expectation of what may come to them after the father’s death, when there will be insurances and savings to be divided.  The daughter who marries has no dot.  The daughter who remains unmarried has no fortune until her father dies:  very often she has none after that event.

In Germany, where the custom of the dot is not, I believe, so prevalent, there are companies or societies founded for the express purpose of providing for unmarried women.  They work, I am told, with a kind of tontine—­it is, in fact, a lottery.  On the birth of a girl the father inscribes her name on the books of the company, and pays a certain small sum every year on her account.  At the age of twenty-five, if she is still unmarried, she receives the right of living rent free in two rooms, and becomes entitled to a certain small annuity.  If she marries she has nothing.  Those who marry, therefore, pay for those who do not marry.  It is the same principle as with life insurances:  those who live long pay for those who die young.  If we assume, for instance, that four girls out of five marry, which seems a fair proportion, the fifth girl receives five times her own premium.  Suppose that her father has paid L5 a year for her for twenty-one years, she would receive the amount, at compound interest, of L25 a year for twenty-one years—­namely, about a thousand pounds.