was the most outrageous use of adjectives. "Rip up the bourgeois," "Cut button holes in the capitalistic skins," were war cries. There was an abundance of talk about putting vitriol into wine, ground glass into flour, and dynamite in the coal bin. It all ended in Gallic panic, and composure. Sorrel has now left the Syndicalists for the Royalist camp. And Paul Louis, a little journalist, is writing for them. He was anxious that I should not regard him as a "mere anarchist."

"We believe in organized society," he

almost a million, why not of 15,000,000? There have been general strikes in Belgium and Italy and Scandinavia. Why not in all countries on the same day? It is merely a matter of organization."

The Syndicalists claim more than 300,000 members, and are growing. The most significant additions to their ranks are the school masters who have formed an organization for protecting themselves against unjust political demands, and for raising their pay. Thiers, before he became President, while still a functionary

Quelques Retraites de hauts dignitaires de la République bourgeoise.

Amiral ou Général 1.000

10.800 kr.

Ambassadeur

10.000 fr.

Ministre

Plénipotentiaire

10.000 fr.

Controleur

de l'Administration

de la Marine

8.000 tranes

Procureur Général 6.000 kr.

Trésorier Payrur

General 6.000 tranes

Inspecteur des Ponts

et Chaussées

6.000 fr.

Prefet 1,000 francs

Capitale

8.300 transe

Quelques Retraites de gros tonotionnaires de la République bourgeoise.

Directeur d'Enregistrement 8.000 fr.

Chel de Bureau de Ministère 4500 franes Commissaire Special (de Police)

800 franca Receveur Particulier

dno Pmances 4.000 franes

Percepteur

4.000 trance

Conservateur des Hypothèques 4.000 h.

Gendarme

1.100 francs

Apent de Pulice

1.200 tr. Gardien de Prison 1.000 tr.

PLACEMENT GRATUIT au siège des Syndicats adherents.

said, "but not for the exploitation of capital. Such a government would be local, not national. Each locality would have its economic functions taken care of by the local government. There would be a league of all communes for purposes of coöperation. At present the Government is a government by property for property. We can overthrow it only by the general strike."

"But is the general strike possible?" I asked.

"Why not? We have had strikes of

of monarchy, objected to the establishment of government schools in every town because he did "not want a red priest in every village." To-day he would find these red priests of Socialism everywhere. I was told that 70 per cent. of the primary and secondary school men are inclined toward Socialism. Some of the text books are written with a Socialistic bias. Herve, for instance, has written a school history of France.

But in spite of the numbers of those who have embraced Socialism, in spite

of its power, you are impressed with the vagueness of it all. There is that elusiveness about French Socialism which, to an Anglo-Saxon, is exasperating. In vain you try to pin down a French Socialist to something definite. He always slips away from you with his unctuous rhetoric. "We French so dearly love the dramatic, the romantic. We adore triumphant insurrection," one of them said to me after I had tried for half an hour to glue him down to a definite proposition.

Now, this zeal and this vagueness are just the two characteristics that you must find in a propaganda, a ferment that is to work lasting changes in the established order of things. Its indefiniteness lures, its zeal propels, the unthinking masses.

In France the movement has gradually democratized the populace. It has made war increasingly difficult. It has driven employers of labor into the defensive. It has not yet destroyed the ancient bureaucracy, but it is at work.

It has not made very deep inroads upon

the domain of private property. France is a country of men of modest property. It has more land holders than Germany, Austria, and England combined. It is a frugal, income-loving land. But thousands of peasants and small shop-keepers are Socialists. Their Socialism is speculative, their property is actual - a duality that never troubles a Frenchman.

Meanwhile Socialism is spreading rapidly. It has multitudes of adherents among the educated classes. One is amazed at the number of college professors, scholars, lawyers, and authors that are Socialists. And even Anatole France, the last of the great French literati, aristocrat of aristocrats, has taken his place by the side of Jaurès in the warfare for the poor.

Socialism is spreading into every corner of France. Nothing seems able to check it. It is an ever-increasing current of discontent and protest. And it will require great genius to guide it—if it can be guided.

F SOMEONE could only have told me before I left college, how different my business life would have been!

Even now, I seldom pass the great hotel that, like a giant sentinel, confronts the traveler as he emerges from the Grand Central station into 42d Street, without being mentally transported to the time I arrived in New York to begin a business career.

College days were not very far behind me then and life was still enshrouded in that nebulous glamour without which no one can ever live and succeed. To me, that great, towering thing did not mean

"thou shalt not enter"; it simply stood against the dark sky as a sort of exhilarating promise as real to me as its massive sides of stone and steel. To this sense of material charm and hope, to youth, abundant vitality, and a Puritanical home training, I owe the fact that I never faltered during the long, weary years that have intervened.

I have always promised myself and others that, if the day ever came when I felt that I had found my life work, I would lose no time in telling the story of my struggle, in the hope that those who are giving their lives to the education of

women and to their preparation for the world might read between the lines a lesson to be profited by in shaping future educational courses. Here is also a special message to any woman who has not yet formed her future. May it help her to decide before she takes a step; otherwise, she may find herself wandering around in a seemingly aimless circle, as I did, filling the part of a misfit, until she hits upon the thing for which she is temperamentally, as well as mentally, fitted. For this floundering means physical and mental despair, and from that I would save all women, if it were possible.

I had had a fair preparatory school education and my whole idea in taking up college work was to fit myself to be a teacher, for there was no other profession open to women that offered like opportunities just then. Four happy, care-free years in college, and I was launched upon the world, ready to do and dare.

Then the trouble began. A brief career of teaching in my home town very clearly showed me that my heart was not in the work. I was successful, because of energy and perseverance, but I well remember how I had to pretend that I was doing something else, all through the day, to put the necessary snap into it. There are plenty of teachers, this minute, who are doing the same thing - some of them have confessed it to me. Isn't it a pity?

Opportunity came in a strange manner. I had an inherited taste and love for music and the drama. The leading morning paper in my home town a city of about 100,000 people needed someone temporarily to report musical and dramatic happenings. I heard of it, applied, and my reportorial career started at the princely sum of $3 a week. That first $3, however, gave me a greater sense of richness than my large pay envelope from the school, for I began to realize that here, at last, was the thing I was fitted for a life in the business world where I could see the world and be part of it. And, when I was allowed to do general reporting and my "scoop" on a certain baseball story made a New York editor think that it had been written by a man, I felt that all that was

You will laugh when I tell you that it was midsummer when I came to New York. It is laughable because everyone knows that no one in the business world is taking on assistance of any kind during the summer months. So, although my newspaper friends did their very best, I had to give up the idea of entering upon a literary career, because I could not hold out financially.

This lesson I learned only after months of living in a room without any daylight or air, eating only when I could get money enough from what I had written to pay for my meals, writing at night and tramping the streets all day, trying to sell my stories, until I began to feel the inroads of discouragement upon that enthusiasm which had, so far, carried me over the rough places.

At this point I made up my mind to learn stenography and to follow no matter where it led. A wealthy woman living not far from New York engaged me as companion because of my knowledge of music and because she said I never looked worried! Through her kindness, I was enabled to study at night, and three times a week to go to a business college in New York until I had progressed far enough to be able to "rattle around" in a stenographer's position at $8 a week. I ground away for a year in that first positionhammered the typewriter. It is significant that I instinctively kept from my employer the fact that I was a college woman. I set my teeth when facing office discipline, bad tempers, smoking, profane language, uncongenial associates, and many other things against which my whole being cried out. During that year, I got my business training.

Still I floundered. The next position was a little better than the last. There was a little more salary and more responsibility. My executive ability began to be recognized. My training as corres

pondent brought me to the attention of a prominent house which was doing advertising through this means and here at last I stumbled upon the path that was to lead me back to where I started six years before. Finding to their astonishment and my own that I had distinct ability for promotive and advertising work, I was placed in charge of that department. The results of my work there brought me to the notice of the promoters of a magazine requiring just that combination of editorial and advertising experience which the last two years had given me. From that, it was a natural step to the work I now have in hand; and so, at the end of all these years in New York, I have only just begun. The point I want to make is that this is too long a circle for any woman to traverse merely to find herself, for it presumes perfect health, sound common sense, boundless patience, unlimited faith, and an intuitive knowledge of people and things; and these are qualifications that not everyone possesses.

My story is, of course, only one of hundreds of similar experiences among women of education, whether they have had college training or not. Every day they drift into the employment offices in the big cities stenographers who want to learn decorating, decorators who want to do editorial work, teachers who are lured by the strange fascination that advertising seems to have, women who want to be secretaries but who don't know the first thing about stenography and who actually resent the suggestion that it is a necessary qualification for the profession they wish to enter. The unrest manifested by the majority of women in business shows very plainly that they are not happy in the sort of work into which they have stumbled through an early lack of knowledge of the profession they were best qualified to enter. And the conclusion that has been reached by those of us who have come by the long and thorny road is that the real place to begin the shaping of a career is in the preparatory or high school.

Fortunately, the high schools in the large cities throughout the country have

recently begun to introduce into their work some suggestion of domestic training, and musical courses that have done a great deal of good; but, even so, girls in their high school days need guidance as to the course that will best prepare them for the future. I believe that every preparatory school of the grade just beyond the ward school should have a woman whose sole duty should be to study carefully the case of every girl who gives any indication of promise and to advise her what to choose as a profession; and especially to show the girls that not all are fitted to enter public or professional life and that there is a wider field for them than any offered by business-the field of home. If the same plan of having advisors were also to be followed in the women's colleges, there would be fewer misfits in business and more girls who would realize the important places they might occupy after graduation in the life of their own homes and of their home towns.

Happily, within the last year or two, groups of educated women in a number of large cities have begun to realize the importance of helping young girls to shape their future. To that end, they have arranged for some woman who has succeeded in her chosen profession to lecture before the high school girls, to tell them of the possibilities, the hardships, and the requirements in her own particular field of work, so that they may hear, from women who have made the struggle, just what it means to succeed. For example, in the high school at Syracuse, N. Y., Mrs. Van Rennsselaer, of the Household Art Department of Cornell University, addressed the girls; and a prominent dressmaker, a teacher, a public stenographer, and others representing a variety of professions open to women, told of their experiences while making a career. result their young hearers began to realize that not every girl has to be a teacher if she has her own living to earn. Certain professions of which they thus heard made a peculiar appeal to some of them; while many finally decided that, after all, home was a pretty good place.

As a

Equally important, because of its practical assistance to wage-earning women, is the bureau of employment for educated women, founded in New York about two years ago by graduates of all the prominent women's colleges. It has the support the support of the colleges thus represented, and on its board of directors are women prominent in philanthropic and social work. It is open not only to college women but also to non-collegiate applicants whose experience and training place them in the same relative position in professional work. One of the chief aims of this bureau is to aid women who are beginning their careers, as well as to find larger opportunities for those of long experience and thoroughly tested efficiency. Although it has been in active operation less than a year, its success in finding the right people for the right places has been so great that branches are now to be formed in other large cities.

The promoters of this bureau have recognized not only the importance of advisory work such as I have outlined, but also the lack of it in the colleges. To help supply that deficiency they have engaged a woman of long experience in settlement work to consult with and advise those who come to the bureau in search of work, and also to visit business firms throughout the city, to find out the opportunities they offer to educated women and to gain their coöperation. Another member of the staff assists her in the most important work of fitting applicants to positions for which they are suited. This involves a careful study of the requirements of the position offered by the employer and a thorough inquiry into the experience, qualifications, and tastes of the applicant. Without revealing the identity of the firm offering the position, the general scope of the work is outlined to the applicant, together with the present salary offered, possibilities of advancement, and any other details that would enable her to decide whether it is the kind of opening she is looking for. If it does not make a distinct appeal to her, she is not sent for an interview, but other applicants are questioned until just the right person is found. When a position

is filled in this way, it is apt to stay filled to the satisfaction of both employer and employee.

The chief officer of the bureau was invited early this year by the faculties of Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Holyoke colleges to appear before the students and to tell them of the work of the bureau, of the necessity for practical training for various careers, of the requirements of the several professions, and of what to do to prepare themselves in certain lines before leaving college. These things may lead to the introduction into the curricula of elective business courses to be offered during the last two years of college. Such teaching of stenography, typewriting, office detail, secretarial work, editorial work, and commercial art, supplemented with frequent lectures by prominent men and women actively engaged in these lines, would soon limit the work of the bureau to the mere filling of positions. In the meantime, however, they are planning to reach out still further, investigating existing business conditions and requirements, studying the possibilities of every new field that opens up for women.

This story of mine has made no mention of the loneliness, with its consequent temptations, that is the lot of the woman who is blindly groping her way alone in the great business centres. Those of us who have experienced it are aghast at the wish of some women with happy homes and children to follow a career. Ask the next business woman you meet which she would choose if she had her choice. I know now what her answer will be. To some business women, of course, comes the chance to enter the divine field of wifehood and motherhood; but a larger proportion are too busy, too tired, too discouraged, to be able to have much social life, and so the years pass and they find themselves among the number of women who are called "self-sufficient," "self-reliant," "independent" (how I have come to hate these words), when in reality they are longing to exchange the empty glory of success for the home-coming of someone and the clinging of chubby arms.