The subject of woman is no limited subject, nor is woman's life con-fined to household matters alone. Woman's world is wide and spa-cious; anyone who wishes to speak may range through it — especially in our society, where woman is still pulled this way and that by violent and various currents, some of them opposing one another and some in accord. We have the conservative ideas and the liberated ideas; we have those who argue for woman's equality with man in education and culture and grow ardent for their idea, and those who oppose them in this, seeing no need for woman to learn more than a limited number of things to help her carry out the task nature has assigned to her, and who cling stubbornly to their view.

But I shall not knock at that door, for how many talks upon talks we have heard on it... I shall take up instead a very simple subject —

simple, yes, but what moves me to discuss it is that it touches the prac-tical side of woman's life: the daily life in which each one of us wants to do something useful and fruitful, something that grows greater with time and develops steadily until it bears its fruit. It is, besides, drawn from my personal experience in the nature of my work.

The first and most important thing that catches my eye on my way to school every morning is the crowd of maidservants dragging children by the hand to bring them to school. Here is one striding ahead of a child who cannot keep up

with her, wanting him to hurry as she does, while the child trails behind her crying, trying to make her understand that he cannot run like that. There is another standing beside a child, absorbed in gazing at a motorcar whose appearance has astonished her, while the child tries to slip away from her to cross the road to the opposite sidewalk — and he does, and arrives safely, by the care of God and the help of a few passers-by. A third meets a friend of hers and stops to spin out with her an endless conversation, so that the child reaches school late.

These scenes and others like them repeat themselves every morning and every evening, as the pupils go out and as they come home. Yet there is no one who notices them, or thinks of what follows from them, or asks how far they affect the child's upbringing, the shaping of his character, and the direction of his mind and soul.

Poor things, children such as these! Their parents leave their care in the hands of the servant — a stranger, and ignorant more often than not — and from her they pick up ugly habits and a corrupted taste, until the gulf between them and their school-mates has grown wide. On whom does the responsibility for this fall, and who is to blame in this matter of neglect? It is the mother — the mother alone. The servant cannot be held responsible for the child when she accompanies him or plays with him, because she does not feel this responsibility, and because her own upbringing is not the sort of upbringing that would qualify her to take charge of the child's affairs and care for him. I do not know how a mother can permit herself to hand over her own flesh and blood to a servant whom she brought into her house only to do the ordinary chores — sweeping, kneading, washing up, and the like — so that the child is deprived of his mother's tender-ness and care just where he needs more of that tenderness and that care. The result is that the child grows attached to the servant and comes to love her more than he loves his own mother. And how many children we see who shrink