University of Virginia Library

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW
By
WILLIAM HARD
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN T. MCCUTCHEON
IV
THE WASTERS

IT got talked around among Marie's friends that she didn't want children. This was considered very surprising, in view of all that her father and husband had done for her.

Here is what they had done for her:

They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire, to make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in defiance of difficulty and at the cost of pain.

Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be exposed to. With this small but important reservation: she might work at avoiding pain.

When the cook had a headache she took Getting-Breakfast for it. When Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the headache.

It was a social ceremony of large proportions, with almost everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice, and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had been round after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day's duration.

Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night with hardly a miss. Marie's troubles were no more numerous than theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie's spread themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.

The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her husband.

President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:

"By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and commercial rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured class we have and the most leisured class in the world."

Marie's father wasn't so very rich either. He was engaged in a business so vividly competitive that Marie's brother was hurried through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.

Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any girl, she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's family.

This view of the matter gave Marie unconsciously to herself, what morality she

had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a prejudicial effect on male efficiency and family prosperity. Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the "therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.

Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much alike to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its decencies without being at all aware of it.

All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her, up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as the town afforded.

But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond their expectations. They hadn't quite anticipated all of the sweetly undeviating inertia of her mind.

Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact; she was The Nice Girl. She was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken—a perfect dear. She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she never ceased from her career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books, she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."

It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on her father, her husband, and herself.

A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they re-inscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she was.

What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have gone into the making of leisure—for other people!

Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start of modern leisure.

In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions of them.

It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history of the world without the intervention of human fingers.

On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and function. The Spinster ceased to be.

The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating forever.

We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all understand that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working force of ten girls, he prophesied the factory "slum."

We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he utterly changed their character and how he marvelously increased their number.

But look! His machine, with the countless machines which followed it, in the spinning industry and in all other industries, made it possible to organize masses of individuals into industrial regiments which required captains and majors and colonels and generals. It created the need of leadership, of multitudinous leadership. And with leadership came the rewards of leadership. And the wives and daughters of the leaders (a race of men previously, by comparison, nonexistent) arose in thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions to live in leisure and semi-leisure on the fruits of the new system.

While the maids went to the "slums," the mistresses went to the suburbs.

Looking at it in that way, one sometimes doesn't feel so sorry for the maids.

What did Wyatt get out of it? Imprisonment for debt and the buzz of antiquarians above his rotted corpse.

Wyatt and his equally humble successors in genius, Hargreaves and Crompton, artisans! Where in history shall we find men the world took more from, gave less to?

To Hargreaves, inventing the spinning jenny, a mob and a flight from Lancashire, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton, inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpassed the delicate pulling motion of the spinster's arm)—to Crompton, poverty so complete that the mule, patient bearer of innumerable fortunes to investors, was surrendered to them unpatented, while its maker retired to his "Hall-in-the-Wood" and his workman wages!

Little did Wyatt and Hargreaves and Crompton eat of the bread of idleness they built the oven for.

But Arkwright! There was the man who foreshadowed, in his own career, the new aristocracy about to be evoked by the new machinery. He made spinning devices of his own. He used everybody else's devices. He patented them all. He lied in the patents. He sued infringers of them. He overlooked his defeats in the courts. He bit and gouged and endured and invented and organized till, from being a barber and dealing in hair-dyes and bargaining for the curls of pretty girls at country fairs, he ended up Sir Richard Arkwright and—last perfect touch in a fighting career—was building a church when he died.

And his son was England's richest commoner.

It was the dawn of the day of common richness.

The new aristocracy was as hospitably large as the old aristocracy had been sternly small. Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted (and so recently!) to the machinery set going by that spontaneous explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years ago, kept going (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women, and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.

Marie's view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by somebody's work, that just "Being a Good Woman" or "Being a Decent Fellow" is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a parasite as the vicious parasite:—that the former differs from the latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting it in return for nothing.

To get something for nothing is the fundamental immorality in the world. But we don't believe it. There will be a revolution before we get it into our heads that trying to trade a sweet disposition or an intelligent appreciation of opera or a proficiency at amateur tennis for three meals a day is a fraud.

Marie didn't mean to commit a fraud. She just dropped a sentimental, non-negotiable plugged nickel into the slot-machine of life and drew out a motor car and a country place, and was innocently pleased. Such a wonderful slot-machine! She never saw the laboring multitudes behind it, past and present multitudes, dead fingers, living fingers, big men's fingers, little children's fingers, pulling the strings, delivering the prizes, laying aside the plugged nickel in the treasury of a remote revenge.

Perhaps the reason why she didn't catch on to the fact that, instead of being the world's creditor, she was really inhabiting an almshouse was that she was so busy.

You see, she not only did things all the time but she had to find and invent them to do. Her life, even before she was married, was much more difficult than her brother's, who simply got up in the morning and took the same old 7:42 to the same old office.

When he wanted clothes he went to the nearest decent tailor.

No such cinch for Marie. Her tailor lived in Sutherton, on the directly opposite side of the city from the suburb in which Marie lived. Just to get to that tailor's cost Marie an hour and a half of effort. She had got up early, but by the time the tailor had stuck the world's visible supply of pins into the lines of her new coat, most of the forenoon had been arduously occupied.

Of course many forenoons had to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes increasingly complex and minute and exacting and time-occupying in precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which occupation must be devised.

Besides, it gives employment to the tailors.

This is the really meritorious function of the leisure class. It gives employment. And every extension of its tastes and needs gives more employment. Marie and her friends greatly increased the number and prosperity of tailors and milliners and candy-dippers and perfume-manufacturers and manicurists and hair-dressers and plumed-bird hunters and florists and cab-drivers and Irish lace-makers and Chinese silkworm tenders and violet-and-orris sachet-powder makers and matinée heroes and French nuns who embroider underwear and fur-traders and pearl-divers and other deserving persons, not forgetting the multitudes of Turks who must make nougat or perish.

In fact, Marie and her friends, in the course of a year, gave as much employment as a fair-sized earthquake. That is, in the course of a year, they destroyed, without return, a large amount of wealth and set many people to work replacing it. If we had a large enough leisure class we should have no need of fires and railroad wrecks and the other valuable events which increase our prosperity by consuming it.

Marie belonged to the real Consumers' League. And she consumed prettily and virtuously. It wasn't bad air that suffocated her soul. It was no air.

She thought she was breathing, however, and breathing fast. Why, it was half-past eleven before she got back down-town from her tailor, and she bought a wedding present till one, and she was just famished and ran to a tea-room, but she had hardly touched a mouthful when she remembered there was a girl from out of town who had come in to spend a month doing nothing and had to be helped, but though she rushed to the 'phone she couldn't get her friend before it was time to catch her suburban train home; in order to do which she jumped into the station 'bus, only to remember she had forgotten to buy a ribbon for her Siamese costume for the Benefit Ball; but it was too late now and she spent her time, going out on the train, trying to think of some way of getting along without it, and her head began to ache; but luckily she met some of the girls on her way from the station to her high-school sorority alumnæ reunion and they began to tell her how to do it; but she had to hurry away because she had promised to go to the house of one of the girls and do stencil patterns, which started to be beautiful, but before she could get any of them really done she recollected that Chunk Brown had sent over a bunch of new songs and was coming to call to-night and she had to scoot home and practice "June time is moon time and tune time and spoon time," as well as "The grass is blue o'er little Sue" till there was just one hour left before dinner and she was perfectly crazy over the new "do" which one of the girls had showed her and she rushed upstairs and went at that do and by dinner time she had got it almost right, so that Father told her always to do her hair like that and Brother wished he had it down at the factory to replace a broken dynamo brush, while as for Chunk, he was nicer than ever till he learned he had to take her to a rehearsal of the Siamese Group for the Benefit Ball: so that, what with having to coax him to go and what with changing into her costume, she got to the rehearsal so tired she couldn't stand up to go through the figures till she caught sight of the celebrated esthete, the Swami Ram Chandra Gunga Din, who was there to hand out the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie there was great consolation to be found in realizing that life is a spiral and that therefore you can't make progress straight up but must go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow, which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy in between two periods of happiness and therefore felt she was getting

MARIE IDLE?—

[Description: Cartoon=like illustration of a woman visiting a library, the slums, a lecture, and a tea room. ]

along the spiral and into Culture pretty well, till it was eleven o'clock and she waked Chunk up out of a chair in the hall and made him take her home; and he said the Swami was a very clever man and she said American men had no culture and didn't understand women, and Chunk didn't even say good-night to her, and she went to sleep crying, and remembering she hadn't after all learned from the girls how to get along without that ribbon in her costume and she must get up early and buy it, which made her utter one final little plaintive sniffle of vexation.

It was a nice child's life, full of small things which looked big, uncorrected in its view of Love, Culture, Charity, or anything else by any carrying of the burdens, enduring of the shocks, or thrilling to the triumphs, of a really adult life. Her brother, when he went to work, was her junior. In five years he was much her senior. (You may verify this by observations among your own acquaintances.) Marie was not a minute older now than when she left school. Talking to her at twenty-six was exactly the same experience as talking to her at twenty-one. That was what the world, from John Wyatt to her father, had done for her.

From such a life there are necessarily revulsions. The empty leisure of the Nice Girl is quite successfully total waste. But it becomes intolerable to that waster who, though not desiring genuine occupation, desires genuine sensation.

Hence smart sets.

Every social group in which there is much leisure has its own smart set. There may be a million dollars a year to spend. There may be only a few thousands. But there is always a smart set.

How suddenly its smartness may follow its leisure, how accurately its plunge into luxury may duplicate the suddenness of modern luxury itself, you may observe with your own eyes almost anywhere.

You see a little crowd of women come into the Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry in Novellapolis in the fresh West. When they remove their automobile veils you see that they were once, and very recently, the nicest sort of members of the sewing circle and the W. C. T. U. of Lone Tree Crossing.

When the waiter comes along with their cocktails and they begin to sip them out of their tea-cups, you wake up with a jerk to realize that it's half-past three

—ONE SHOULD SAY NOT.

[Description: Cartoon-like illustration of a woman going to the library, a music lesson, a dressmaker, a committee meeting, a hairdresser, and a manicurist. ]

in the afternoon and the evening has begun.

How rapid it all is!

There's Margaret Simpson. A few years ago you might have seen her pumping the water for Jim's breakfast, cleaning the lamps, and picking bugs off the potato vines.

Jim came to town. He struck it poor. Then he struck it rich. He owns a bunch of moving-picture places. He manufactures a patented bottle-stopper. He's a pavement contractor. His wife has just as much leisure as any duchess.

The duchess has her individual estate and resources, which make it possible for her to lead an almost complete social life within her own walls. But never mind! Margaret has the Down-town District, coöperatively owned, coöperatively maintained, magnificently equipped with bright boudoirs in the rest-rooms of the department stores, with wonderful conservatories where one may enter and gaze and pay no more attention to the florist than to one's own gardener, with sumptuous drawing-rooms, like the Purple Parlor of the St. DuBarry, with body-servants in the beauty-shops, with coachmen on the taxi-cabs, with seclusion in the Ladies' Department of the Novellapolis Athletic Club—an infinitely resourceful estate, which Margaret knows as intimately as the duchess knows hers.

This morning she hunted down a new reduction plant on the eighteenth floor of the Beauty Block and weighed in at 185 on the white enamel scales, and after an hour of Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company-light-therapy weighed out at 182-6.

At luncheon she ate only purée of tomatoes, creamed chicken-and-sweetbreads, Boston brown bread and butter, orange punch and Lady Baltimore cake, severely cutting out the potatoes.

After luncheon she spent an hour in a tiny room which had mirrors all around it and a maid (as trim and French-accented as any maid any duchess could have) and a couple of fitters and a head fitter. It ended up with: "Do you mean to tell me that after all the reducing and dieting I've been doing I can't wear under a twenty-seven? It's ridiculous. I tell you what. Measure me for a made-to-order. These stock sizes all run large. If it's made-to-order I can wear a twenty-six as easy as anybody."

Then she met up with her friends at the St. DuBarry.

You watch the waiter bring another round of drinks and you perceive that the evening is well under way and that the peak of the twenty-four hours is being disputatiously approached.

It appears that Perinique's is a swell place to dine, but that the cheese is bad. The cheese is good right here at the St. DuBarry, but they don't know how to toast the biscuits. At the Grünewurst the waiters are poor. At Max's the soup is always cold. The mural decorations at the Prince Eitel are so gloomy they give you a chill.

Despair settles down on the scene. There seems to be no likelihood that there will be any dinner at all anywhere. A ray of light penetrates with the inquiry whether you saw the way Jim looked at Dora last night. If I was you, Margaret, and my husband looked at Dora like that, I—. . . No wonder Dora's husband divorced her. . . . The trouble with Margaret is she's too good to Jim. If she had any sense she could make him so jealous he'd stand on his head for her. . . . Why don't you tell Ned to cut in there and pay a little attention to Marge? . . . Oh, Ned's no good. . . . Well, I'll tell my husband— . . . Don't you do it: I started my husband once on a thing like that and he— . . . That's right. Ned's not married. Let him do it. . . . Somebody ought to. . . . Call Ned on the 'phone. . . . We'll eat at the Royal Gorge and I'll put 'em side by side. . . . I'll sit next to Jim and point it out to him. . . . Say, Marge, it's a good thing you've got on your white broadcloth and those willow plumes. . . . You can get 'em at Delatour's now for twenty-five dollars. . . . Say, I called Ned on the 'phone and what do you think? He's got an engagement for to-night. . . . Say, here's Dora now.

Dora: "Got to sweep right along. Goin' to buzz out to the Inland Inn for dinner with Ned."

Talk of nerve!

Exit Dora.

Enter Stern Moralist. Points gaunt finger at ex-members of Lone Tree Crossing Sewing Circle. Says: "Back to your kitchens, women, and get supper for your husbands."

Onlookers: "Great!"

Enter husbands, about to dine with the women right there, or at some other place where dinner is cooked and ready.

Stern Moralist turns to husbands.

Does he? Why not?

Stern Moralist: "Back to the woodshed and chop the kindling for your wife to get supper with."

Onlookers: "Police! Arrest that man! He's crazy."

Stern Moralist, being propelled down corridor: "Well, if the way to restore women to womanliness is to make them do drudgery which they can hire somebody else to do, why isn't—"

His voice dies away.

Jim asks where Dora is. Loud chorus tells him. Details of Dora's divorce begin to fly about. Harry orders a round of drinks. Somebody praises the drawn butter sauce at the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La Fontaine. Jim thinks Dora's divorce was her husband's fault. Margaret gets up and goes back to the Purple Parlor and cries. Bessie begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned is to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim gets up to find Margaret and tell her what he thinks of her. Finds her crying and thinks she is crying because Ned is away with Dora. Terrible row in Purple Parlor. Bessie starts in to explain. Everybody stands about in couples explaining. Waiter runs around trying to find gen'l'man to pay for undrunk drinks. Poor Frank, being the only member of the party who hasn't been drinking, is so sober that he pays. He finally corrals the whole crowd into a couple of taxi-cabs. They go down the street with everybody's head out of the cab-window and everybody's voice saying "The Suddington," "The Grünewurst," "Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."

The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former articles; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of next month.

Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world's mental strife. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits

of toil and service which produce power and character.

With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort—to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world's worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!

But what a preparation for it had Marie!

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future—of her type.

From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts toward new-found activity: toward an enormous, never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character—like Marie's—just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.

Marie wasn't negative enough—she wasn't positive enough in her negativeness—to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in

order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial asset.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner-table in the café of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.

No struggle in Marie's life so far! No having to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. No being accustomed to the disagreeable feel of that water.

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being hardened to work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.

For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on Chunk's monthly check.

She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. Her father used to support her. Her job then was being nice. That was her job now. And she was nice. And she was still supported. Perfectly logical.

For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.

When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.

In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.

Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.

The causes were similar.

The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes just as we have machines in masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Cæsar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours—the increased competitiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to child-bearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric—or for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world—for she did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship—for she did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic—the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really

democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity—that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the start? Wasn't it only the means to the finish?

Eating a grouse destroys in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider-down or on straw, arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.

On the other hand we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable-floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eiderdown or straw, without service rendered and without fatigue endured, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was as reasonable a proposition as that two and two make four.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the habit of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind atrophied all the instincts of that struggle including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.

The detailed daily reasons for this ultimate social law stand clear in Marie's life. And remember what sort of woman she was. The woman who is coerced by external, authoritative ideals will bear children even when the wish to bear them is really absent. She will bear them without thinking. She will bear them because she has never thought that anything else was possible. But Marie (and this means millions of women throughout the modern world) was free, wonderfully, unparalleledly free.

She was free, though a leisured woman, from the requirement of an heir for a great family estate. She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's will.

Modern life had done all this for her. She was uncoerced by family authority, ecclesiastical authority, or marital authority. She was limitlessly free, limitlessly irresponsible, a creature of infinite opportunities and no duties.

All social coercion toward childbearing having been withdrawn from her, the only guide she had left (and it would have been her best one) was instinct and impulse.

But with the cessation from struggle, with the cessation from effort and from fatigue and from discipline, and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, that instinct and impulse had disappeared. With the petrifaction of its soil, it had withered away.

She had been sedulously trained to sterility.

Nevertheless, when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want children, everybody thought it very surprising, in view of all that had been done for her.