As a matter of fact, also, the couplet is not true about woman; whether it ought to be true is an ethical question that will not be considered here.  The whistling girl does not commonly come to a bad end.  Quite as often as any other girl she learns to whistle a cradle song, low and sweet and charming, to the young voter in the cradle.  She is a girl of spirit, of independence of character, of dash and flavor; and as to lips, why, you must have some sort of presentable lips to whistle; thin ones will not.  The whistling girl does not come to a bad end at all (if marriage is still considered a good occupation), except a cloud may be thrown upon her exuberant young life by this rascally proverb.  Even if she walks the lonely road of life, she has this advantage, that she can whistle to keep her courage up.  But in a larger sense, one that this practical age can understand, it is not true that the whistling girl comes to a bad end.  Whistling pays.  It has brought her money; it has blown her name about the listening world.  Scarcely has a non-whistling woman been more famous.  She has set aside the adage.  She has done so much towards the emancipation of her sex from the prejudice created by an ill-natured proverb which never had root in fact.

But has the whistling woman come to stay?  Is it well for woman to whistle?  Are the majority of women likely to be whistlers?  These are serious questions, not to be taken up in a light manner at the end of a grave paper.  Will woman ever learn to throw a stone?  There it is.  The future is inscrutable.  We only know that whereas they did not whistle with approval, now they do; the prejudice of generations gradually melts away.  And woman’s destiny is not linked with that of the hen, nor to be controlled by a proverb—­perhaps not by anything.

BORN OLD AND RICH

We have been remiss in not proposing a remedy for our present social and economic condition.  Looking backward, we see this.  The scheme may not be practical, any more than the Utopian plans that have been put forward, but it is radical and interesting, and requires, as the other schemes do, a total change in human nature (which may be a good thing to bring about), and a general recasting of the conditions of life.  This is and should be no objection to a socialistic scheme.  Surface measures will not avail.  The suggestion for a minor alleviation of inequality, which seems to have been acted on, namely, that women should propose, has not had the desired effect if it is true, as reported, that the eligible young men are taking to the woods.  The workings of such a measure are as impossible to predict in advance as the operation of the McKinley tariff.  It might be well to legislate that people should be born equal (including equal privileges of the sexes), but the practical difficulty is to keep them equal.  Life is wrong somehow.  Some are born rich and some are born poor, and this inequality makes misery,