with an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back.  He has a vague, hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and that in submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have to pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a noble example of obedience.  I must take the liberty to remind him that the law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute but a phenomenon.  He may reply:  “It is imperative; the penalty for disobedience is failure.  If I pay more in salaries and wages than I need to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me from the field.”  If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke it out by coining the sweat of his workwomen into nickels I’ve nothing to say to him.  Let him adopt in peace the motto, “I cheat to eat.”  I do not know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl and the owling eagle, approves the needy man of prey and makes a place for him at table.

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch—­as cunning is the wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward.  Nobody is altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent seamen.  To oppress one’s own workmen, and provide for the workmen of a neighbor—­to skin those in charge of one’s own interests while cottoning and oiling the residuary product of another’s skinnery—­that is not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in place of both.  The man who eats pate de fois gras in the sweat of his girl cashier’s face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his typewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably satisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in his own home—­a fairly good one—­he may enjoy and merit that highest and most honorable title on the scroll of woman’s favor, “a good provider.”  One having a claim to that glittering distinction should enjoy immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, “From whose backs and bellies do you provide?”

So much for the material results to the sex.  What are the moral results?  One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not and can not know—­to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish, book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that hedges womanhood.  If men of the world with years enough to have lived out of the old regime into the new would testify in this matter there would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform-ladies.  Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were in the “dark backward and absym of time,” but something of the moral distance between even so free-running a creature as the society girl and the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office, would speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) his testimony would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsy matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males of Emancipation.  It would pain, too, some very worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with “the cause.”