woman. But here is the brief story of her misfortunes:

Ten years ago, I said good-bye to a college friend, who was one of the most brilliant graduates of Chicago University. Last winter a letter came in her handwriting from a homestead in one of the inland villages in California. With all her earthly possessions in a buck-board and a thoroughbred stallion between the shafts, she had driven across the desert to a raw, new homestead and begun life in one of the little portable, box-like houses that outfitters sell to settlers and dump out in the sage brush with posts at each four corners to keep a strong wind from upsetting this human packing box. In Nebraska, in the Dakotas, in Minnesota, in the early day s-the woman homesteaders' frontier shanty has been almost as frequent as the man's. I remember in one drive on the Upper Missouri, I counted twelve such in a distance of thirty miles.

While the studychair essayist has been learnedly discussing whether

Eastern Railroad king, who is at the head of one of the largest estates on the Hudson-the explanation of the woman movement to the land is the same as the explanation of all other economic movements-plain bread and butter. When dairying went out of the home and weaving went out of the home and the making of cloth and nine-tenths of all the textile industries went from home to factory-woman simply went out of the home into the factory in pursuit of her own special calling. When the public school monopolized teaching, women went into the public school. When the care of

woman ought or ought not to be a wageearner in the modern sense of that term, "stirring the waters muddy to make them look deep," as Nietzsche would say -women have been on the very fore front of the frontier of wage-earning; and the striking thing is that the wageearning has not been away from the home but back to it-a reassertion of the home instinct in office and school and store. It has been something even more significant than that. While the doctrinaires have still been arguing about her status, woman has been adapting herself to modern economic conditions and becoming the owner of her own labor and the beneficiary therefrom.

While there are exceptions, such as the young student, who is to manage a 4,000 acre farm, and the daughter of an

the sick became relegated to hospitals, woman simply followed the vocation out of the home and became a trained

nurse.

There was no unsexing in the process, spite of the reams and reams of twaddle that used to be spouted about it fifteen years ago spouted chiefly by neurotics and notoriety hunters. What, then, is the explanation of the fact that store, factory, profession have no sooner let down the bars to women, than women pass through the reluctantly opened door, march across the new vocation, and lower bars at the other end of their progress, to let themselves out to a still wider and newer vocation? The same neurotics and notoriety hunters, who were shouting themselves hoarse fifteen years ago against letting down any bars-their vision of beatitude was evidently that of a gentleman's named Bluebeard-are now wailing that the new movement is "symptomatic"-the word is theirs, not mineof a sex restlessness resultant from the mistake of ever having left the home. (Oh! shades of Bluebeard, as if the new movement. were not straight as an arrow flight back to the home.)

Look a little deeper! Isn't the movement solely and simply the result of every

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other economic movement in the world -bread and butter, with jam when possible?

A young girl of my acquaintance had applied to one of the large magazines of New York for employment. She was taken on as a beginner at $15 a week. "Now, remember," said her new ployer assigning her to her new work, "the Company pays you $15 a week; but for every $15 they pay you, they expect $45 return in work from you." The young face went blank. "Wait! Let me explain," he said. "You come in here green and have to be trained and draw $15 while you are making your blunders. I know it is barely more than you will need to live, as you will be expected to live in your present position. Well, for that salary they are going to expect back $15 in labor plus another $15 in labor for the waste of time in teaching you. Then, perhaps, you know that every Company must have dividends or go out of business. Add another $15. That makes $45, doesn't it?" and he dismissed her smiling; but when that girl had made good and reached the place where she had a right to expect $45 salary for her work, she resigned and took up work where she would own the profits of her own labor. If there be anything more pathetic in life than a man or woman reaching the place where they ought to own the profit of their own labor and don't-ought to have saved for the rest

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places and haven't-I have never encountered it. It always gives me a physical blow to see a man woman past fifty doing work which a young girl or boy could do better.

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The young girl coming to the city knows of the big salaries paid head women in establishments of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago. I personally know of three cases, where women who went to the big department stores of New York as little ragged girls from the east side with "pig tail" braids tied in shoe strings-now earn $7,000 a year and expenses as foreign buyers. What the young girl coming to the big city with high hopes does not realize is that for every $7,000 salary paid, the payee gives back $25,000 in work and nerves strained to the highest pitch, and-most important of allin vitality. Not every set of nerves can stand the strain of the climb up. Fewer nerves can stand the drain when they have reached the high spots; and-do not call the employer a brute-promotion up in hundreds of cases means promotion out. This is not from the innate injustice of things-it is solely that old economic basic fact, bread and butter. Financial strain comes. Stockholders press for dividends-the one next the high spot, though a little younger, can be had a little cheaper; so the valued employe is given a loving cup and a God-speed. And even if the high spot

years of service; but the number of employers of women giving pensions compared to those that do not is as a drop in the ocean. Inevitably comes the day when the position is no longer securethen, woe betide the occupant !

There is another factor in the movement of women back to the land-and that is health. Under the old régime, the woman carded the wool and spun the household clothing when she was well. When she wasn't, she could rest and recuperate. Under the modern factory system with a row of a hundred sewing machines driven at lightning rapidity by electricity rest is an impossibility without arresting the whole industrial plant. This row is busy on sleeves. That row on fronts. For one hand to drop out

for an hour is to demoralize the whole high pressure system; and a life more or less does not count, as a recent factory fire tragically illustrated. Practically, the same routine system exists in many shops-and, I am sorry to say-in many big schools. Nerve specialists warning the present generation that the driving pressure of the modern system, the automatic routine nature of much of the work, may work terrible and degenerating damage to future generations.

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Too often the bars that have let women into a new vocation, have been bars out of a Bluebeard's den to a perpetual tread mill; but the bars on the other side are leading out and back to the green fields. Compare this drive of school and shop and factory and office to the health of a life in the great-outdoors, the security of a home yours inalienably, and an income higher by far than the drive can give, just and in exact proportion to the ability of the worker.

I do not think I am exaggerating it when I say that the same nerve strain and drive exist in the higher vocations open to women. One does not need to point to the frequent collapses of operatic stars. Two or three of them, by the way, have farms where they yearly recuperate by making hay. Or to explain that acting six nights a weeksometimes seven-with three matinees a week-is a good deal harder than over

seeing an apple orchard on an irrigated farm.

My first close knowledge of the woman farmer of the West was not auspicious. Three of us were driving out to a famous mission on the Missouri River. Box after box, we passed, stuck on the naked prairie with posts at the corners to keep the wind from blowing it awaylittle unpainted packing boxes about 10 by 12 feet, with solid boards for shutters, a rain barrel at the back corner to catch the drip of the slope roof, a barbed wire fence round an encircling area of

160 acres and usually not a neighbor in sight till your buckboard dropped over one of the gray couteaus. You saw a coyote skulk away, or brought your whalebone whip with a slash down at a huge rattlesnake coiled in the road to make your horse turn out; and there against the sky line, was another solitary little packing box, with perhaps a washing out on the barbed wire fence, or a bit of scrim curtain across the window, or a broncho tethered behind the shanty, or a scattering of half a dozen white leghorn hens housed in a chicken affair

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extemporized of biscuit box props and sod roof. As I said before, in a drive of thirty miles, we must have seen twelve such homesteads belonging to women. and girls. Sometimes, aged parents from Germany or Switzerland or Norway, had been installed in the little shack. others, half the quarter section was laid out in potato or onion or pickle farming. I want to put on record, in not one case had title been proved up for the purpose of selling. The owners were all holding on to this land-not to sell but to make a permanent home. This one had.

formerly taught school in the country and put in homestead duties as she taught, but had now taken a more lucrative position in the city to earn money to build a house. "Even if she never builds her house, she could sell her homestead for $3,000 tomorrow and I don't know any way in which a woman can earn and save quicker," explained my informant. Another had worked in a jewelry store; but the frontier not evincing any eagerness about buying diamonds, the lady vender had turned her diamonds into dollars, bought a relinquishment and