formity to the will and doctrine of the church, and this sentiment of attaining the good for others, of conferring it on them instead of letting them work it out for themselves, has lived on in our patronage of the poor, of the working man and of woman, even after our formal repudiation of the principle. But this attitude is a slur on the mind, and its persistence in any form is an admission that society has failed to provide conditions within which the mind can freely realize itself.

I hope it is not demanding too much of the attention of the reader to point out also another psychological principle-that the ideally wise and sound choice is one in which all possible alternatives are considered, that any choice, in fact, involves the rejection of all other possible choices which present themselves, and that consequently the most important principle in mental life and the essential to wisdom is to know the conditions of the world as completely as possible. In this sense there is no such thing as a private mind. The mind must be open to all sorts of intrusions from the outside world. There is no possibility of determining beforehand what information may go into the formation of a judgment, and there is the certainty that if full information is absent the judgment will be imperfect. The content of the mind all comes, in fact, from the outside, and the mind must be open to the outside world in all possible ways—in freedom of motion, in freedom of conversation, and in freedom to explore all territories-even the outlawed territory of sex. It would be possible also to go back to the beginning and show that the grade of mind of any species or organism corresponds with its restricted or free power of exploration. The vegetable which does not move at all has no mind at all. The animal mind, which is closed to all but the simple and monotonous stimulations connected with food and sex, remains a simple and monotonous type of mind. That period of history when the mind was not free to explore certain questions is called the “dark ages." And the period of democracy, which is from the psychological standpoint the period of free mental exploration, is also the period of invention, not alone of the mechanical invention which is so conspicuous, but of such inventions as free public schools, preventive medicine, eugenics, and the evolutionary view of the world.

Nor is the case of illustrious men who have withdrawn themselves from society and worked in seclusion an exception to the law that the mind is not a private matter. The materials of knowledge are so vast and so various that out of mere economy of attention and time we have been compelled to resort to specialization, in which a man is supposed to know "something of everything and everything of something." The specialist is often very ill-informed about things in general, and our schools attempt to anticipate this defect by supplying him with a body of “cultural” materials before allowing him to specialize. But the narrowest specialist is not only filling in his consciousness through experiment, reflection and classification, but he lives in a world of books which are a short cut to the opinions of millions of men. He can virtually converse with any man, living or dead, who has anything of importance to say to him, by resort to the printed page. And it is even an economy of time to do this through books rather than conversation.

And if I should here indicate the steps in the development of human consciousness, which I will refrain from doing, I think it would appear that mental improvement in both the individual and the race as a whole is closely associated with the development of the occupations. The mind is a product of activity, and the occupations are merely a formulation of activities along definite and habitual lines. The mind of man, indeed, is not radically improved, but the intensive and unremitting application of attention by men to special subjects gives in the aggregate more, and more varied results, than could be had if the attention of all played loosely over the whole field.

The progress of the world is dependent on the emergence of what we call useful ideas, and these ideas almost invariably emerge in connection with the occupations. We cannot control or predict their appearance, we can only increase the number of chances of their appearance by opening the field of competition to the maximum number of minds. Galton has pointed out that if a genius by any chance appears in a community of say 100,000,000 people, the value of his work, of the ideas which he may originate, is out of all proportion to his numerical relation to the whole of the population. Such an idea as electricity sets

thousands to work along lines which they would otherwise never have entered, or gives a particular and socially valuable direction to their efforts. And thus the sum of knowledge is built up through those specialized pursuits which we call occupational. To exclude women from the occupations is therefore not only to exclude them from those forms of activity which most stimulate the mind, but to deprive society of the benefits which would follow both from their work and from those ideas which they would thus be put in the way of developing. And if there is any value in that variety of personality which compels men to different fields of interest, it is evident that women differing from men in personality more than men differ from one another, are sure to contribute unanticipated results. Their admission is to increase the probability of the emergence of genius.

But I do not contend that women should go into the occupations so much because the occupations need them, though that is also true, as because of the need women have of the occupations. No one is altogether either male or female. The life of men and women corresponds more than it differs. There is no mental function absent in either sex. The occupations represent modes in which the mind expresses itself. They are the moral field, the field of will, of experience, of practice, and of concrete purpose. In this sense work is not a duty but a right. Society may not only claim service from the individual, but the individnal may claim the right to function.

At present the strain on women even in the well-to-do families is intolerable. Their isolation, the triviality of their interests and their dependence on the will of another make them nervous and intensely personal, and merely to relieve the tension, if for nothing else, they should prepare themselves for an occupation which they can practice before marriage, continue to practice if they do not enter marriage, which they may intermit in those intervals when the child is entirely helpless, and which they can resume when the child is adult and departed. Such a preparation would not only overcome their feeling of dependence but would tend to make their choice in marriage more rational. And I do not think the ideals of eugenics can be realized until woman is as free as man in the choice of a mate.

Nor would I give a very definite meaning to the term occupation. There is no possible doubt that the lines containing the occupations will continue to shift and that the participation of women will continue to create new occupations. If the women of enforced leisure, for instance, would shift their interests from dress and fashionable functions and standards, that would constitute an occupation engaging their attention for some years. It is even certain that motherhood will become one of the occupations. The occupations imply a preparation and a purpose, and we cannot regard reproduction and the traditional home life of women as occupational, because mere reproduction is an organic act. frequently inadvertent, and the traditional home life has involved no adequate preparation for motherhood. We may fairly set down eugenic motherhood among the occupations, but even then a part of the mother's occupation will be to continue her con-'. crete purposes and practices in the world at large, and to make excursions from the home for the sake of the home.

And, after all, it is not fair play to say that woman's whole life is demanded by the child, and let it go at that. Already the nurture of the child is carried on to a large extent outside of the home. And if those newer ideals of the home and the sentiment of eugenics to which I have referred are realized, if the child is not only in theory but in practice recognized as the main interest of society, the family and society will more and more assist the mother in his nurture. We must remember also that when women are naturally reared they have an astonishing amount of energy. The records of savage society and of peasant life still demonstrate this, as did the home before the coming of the machine. It may seem ungracious to say so, but we indulge a good deal in what the rhetoricians call the "pathetic fallacy" in connection with the bearing of children by women. Nature has given them an energy and disposition in proportion to this very serious function, so that under normal conditions it may be classed among the pleasures, almost among the intoxications. A normal woman can bear children and still retain more energy and more tenacity of life than nature usually gives to man. The close association which we find between marriage and the aband-· onment of concrete purposes is not therefore a sacrifice to motherhood but a habit. The ordinary woman instantly and

utterly abandons all occupational preparation or practice at the altar, and this is quite aside from the anticipation of children. And the university woman succumbs almost as completely. Women indeed have improved in their mental attitude toward life since the early Victorian period to this extent, that they actually make a preparation for life, which they can use in case they do not accept marriage. But they keep only a wavering eye on the occupational outlook as a makeshift in case of their failure to realize on their matrimonial anticipations. Or at any rate when marriage is proposed to them they are unable to abandon the traditional view that marriage means a retirement from the world only less complete than retirement to a convent.

Woman's responsibility to the race may well be regarded as paramount, but it is not overwhelming, and it is neither wise nor kind to regard her life as a total loss in all points but this single one. It would indeed seem that opposition to woman's participation in the totality of life is a romantic subterfuge, resting not so much on a belief in the disability of woman as on the disposition of man to appropriate conspicuous and pleasurable objects for his sole use and ornamentation. "A little thing, but all mine own," was one of the remarks of Achilles to Agamemnon in their quarrel over the two maidens, and it contains the secret of man's world-old disposition to overlook the intrinsic worth of woman.

Annals of the American Academy. 33: 326-37. March, 1909. Work of Women in the Mercantile Houses of Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth Beardsley Butler.

The little cash girl in her plain black suit starts into a new world when she enters the store, leaving school behind her. Only a small part of this world is opened out to her at first, as she learns to carry messages and parcels and change, to direct customers to different departments and sometimes, where she sees opportunity, to anticipate a want or to supply an unlooked-for need. She learns to find her way about, to know where the stock- ́ rooms are, how the stock of various kinds is kept, and how in rows of cages girls sit making entries in books all day long.