and doing as our richer neighbors do, until in England we have made our girls such expensive articles that many young men simply dare not indulge in them, and are led to seek in their luxurious clubs the comfort which they should find in a home of their own, with all that relaxation of moral fibre which comes from club life.  Do we seriously think that we are likely successfully to contend against the degradation of women by our Rescue Societies and our Refuges when we are deliberately bringing about a social condition that ministers to it?  “Oh, of course,” said a near relative of my own, “no girl can marry comfortably and live in London with less than a thousand a year.”  All I can answer is that if this be so, it means the degradation of women writ large.

And have we even secured the happiness of our own daughters by this high standard of living which prevents so many of them from marrying at all?  These unmarried girls, with no worthy object in life to call out the noble energies that lie dormant within them, “lasting” rather than “living,”—­are they really happy?  Is not Robert Louis Stevenson right when he says that “the ideal of the stalled ox is the one ideal that will never satisfy either man or woman”?  Were not the hardships of a smaller income and a larger life—­a life that would at least satisfy a woman’s worst foe, heart hunger,—­more adapted to their true nature, their true happiness?

And to what further admirable results have we attained by this high standard of comfort and luxury?  Nature has carefully provided for the equality of the sexes by sending rather more boys than girls into the world, since fewer boys are reared; but we have managed to derange this order.  We have sent our boys out into the world, but we have kept our girls at home, refusing to allow them to rough it with husbands and brothers or to endure the least hardness.  The consequence is that we have nearly a million of surplus women in the old country, while in America, and in our own colonies, we have a corresponding surplus of men, with all the evil moral consequences that belong to a disproportion between the sexes.  Truly we may congratulate ourselves!

I would therefore urge that if we are really to grapple with these moral evils, we should simplify our standard of living, and educate our girls very differently to what, at least in England, we are doing.  Culture is good, and the more we have of it the better; it gives a woman a wider sphere of influence, as well as more enlightened methods of using that influence.  But if dead languages are to take the place of living service; if high mathematics are to work out a low plane of cooking and household management; if a first class in moral science is to involve third class performance of the moral duties involved in family life, then I deliberately say it were better that, like Tennyson’s mother, we should be

    “Not learned save in gracious household ways.”