The ideal World.

Many of us are worried about her.  What is going to become of the home?  I admit there is a more ideal existence where the working woman would find no place; it is in a world that exists only on the comic opera stage.  There every picturesque village contains an equal number of ladies and gentlemen nearly all the same height and weight, to all appearance of the same age.  Each Jack has his Jill, and does not want anybody else’s.  There are no complications: one presumes they draw lots and fall in love the moment they unscrew the paper.  They dance for awhile on grass which is never damp, and then into the conveniently situated ivy-covered church they troop in pairs and are wedded off hand by a white-haired clergyman, who is a married man himself.

Ah, if the world were but a comic opera stage, there would be no need for working women!  As a matter of fact, so far as one can judge from the front of the house, there are no working men either.

But outside the opera house in the muddy street Jack goes home to his third floor back, or his chambers in the Albany, according to his caste, and wonders when the time will come when he will be able to support a wife.  And Jill climbs on a penny ’bus, or steps into the family brougham, and dreams with regret of a lost garden, where there was just one man and just one woman, and clothes grew on a fig tree.

With the progress of civilization—utterly opposed as it is to all Nature’s intentions—the number of working women will increase.  With some friends the other day I was discussing motor-cars, and one gentleman with sorrow in his voice—he is the type of Conservative who would have regretted the passing away of the glacial period—opined that motor-cars had come to stay.

“You mean,” said another, “they have come to go.”  The working woman, however much we may regret it, has come to go, and she is going it.  We shall have to accept her and see what can be done with her.  One thing is certain, we shall not solve the problem of the twentieth century by regretting the simple sociology of the Stone Age.