Let us not be misled here by a false analogy.  Today I may get a thwack o’ the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of unconsciousness between yesterday and to-morrow.  Thereafter I may live to a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, or was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between the old life and the new there will be a nexus, a thread of continuity, something spanning the gulf from the one state to the other, and the same in both—­namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers.  That is I; that identifies me to others as my former self—­authenticates and credentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance, dislodging memory.

But when death occurs all is dislodged if memory is; for between two merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only nexus conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity.  To live again without memory of having lived before is to live another.  Re-existence without recollection is absurd.  There is nothing to re-exist.

EMANCIPATED WOMAN

What I should like to know is, how “the enlargement of woman’s sphere” by her entrance into 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 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 of which 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.