the condition of this group, and their inquiry led them to the firm conclu-sion that the best help that can be given women on their own is to open to them opportunities for productive work that will fit them to earn their living when the need arises, and give them solace and activity in times of tedium and low spirits.

Wide-ranging measures were taken to this end: employment bureaus were set up for them, and day and night schools to train them in certain kinds of work, to teach them certain crafts, or to retrain them in occupations they had practiced at the outset of their lives.

The experiment succeeded. Within a short space the number of working women past thirty-five rose until it exceeded by a million and a half their number ten years before.

At the same time the number of work-ing women past forty-five doubled, increasing by more than three million in the course of four years.

Facts like these deserve to make us pause and set us thinking. Everything that happens in the West, or anywhere else, is bound to have its echo in our country, in this age which is witnessing men drawing ever closer together, their problems growing alike, and the policy of isolation in retreat.

Woman is more exposed to loneliness than man — not only in the years of her widowhood, or if she is divorced, or if the train of marriage has passed her by. Even in middle age, when her children have grown and can do without her care, when her husband is at the height of his working activity, she finds herself alone, with nothing to do; she feels perplexity and emptiness, and asks herself the meaning of her existence.

At this stage a woman passes through one of the great crises of her life. I do not mean that psychological crises are confined to this stage. But around the middle of life, cares multiply

for men and women alike, as the phantoms of lost hopes haunt them, anxiety over their fate besets them, and the fear of the diseases of age comes over them.

And while the husband is absorbed in his work and the children in their lessons and their dreams, the woman falls prey to

care and despair — all except her who has provided for herself and taken up a profession or a hobby that gives her delight, diversion, and a chance to prove her existence.

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