Take as an illustration the moral training of the child.  The most essential obligation in a Woman’s Business is establishing her household on a sound moral basis.  If a child is anchored to basic principles, it is because his home is built on them.  If he understands integrity as a man, it is usually because a woman has done her work well.  If she has not done it well, it is probable that he will be a disturbance and a menace when he is turned over to society.  Sending defective steel to a gunmaker is no more certain to result in unsafe guns than turning out boys who are shifty and tricky is to result in a corrupt and unhappy community.

Appalled by the seriousness of the task, or lured from it by the joys of liberty and education, the woman has too generally shifted it to other shoulders—­shoulders which were waiting to help her work out the problem, but which could never be a substitute.  She has turned over the child to the teacher, secular and religious, and fancied that he might be made a man of integrity by an elaborate system of teaching in a mass.  Has this shifting of responsibility no relation to the general lowering of our commercial and political morality?

For years we have been bombarded with evidence of an appalling indifference to the moral quality of our commercial and political transactions.  It is not too much to say that the revelations of corruption in our American cities, the use of town councils, State legislatures, and even of the Federal Government in the interests of private business, have discredited the democratic system throughout the world.  It has given more material for those of other lands who despise democracy to sneer at us than anything that has yet happened in this land.  And this has come about under the regime of the emancipated woman.  Is she in no way responsible for it?  If she had kept the early ideals of the woman’s part in democracy as clearly before her eyes as she has kept some of her personal wants and needs, could there have been so disastrous a condition?  Would she be the Uneasy Woman she is if she had kept faith with the ideals that forced her emancipation?—­if she had not substituted for them dreams of personal ambition, happiness, and freedom!

The failure to fulfill your function in the scheme under which you live always produces unrest.  Content of mind is usually in proportion to the service one renders in an undertaking he believes worth while.  If our Uneasy Woman could grasp the full meaning of her place in this democracy, a place so essential that democracy must be overthrown unless she rises to it—­a part which man is not equipped to play and which he ought not to be asked to play, would she not cease to apologize for herself—­cease to look with envy on man’s occupations?  Would she not rise to her part and we not have at last the “new woman” of whom we have talked so long?