ers did he may do; the male sexual heredity is a proud heritage, and only yesterday a man said to me, "Thank God, I am a man.' Contrast with this the corresponding type of heredity in woman. Woman carries in her the slave tradition of her maternal forbears, of people who never did anything because they were never allowed to; who were told that they could do nothing but please, until they at last believed it, until by believing they lost the power of action; who were never taught, and because uneducated were ashamed; who were never helped to understand the work of the world, political, financial, scientific, and, therefore, grew to believe that such realms were not for them. I need not labor the comparison: obviously any woman, inspired by centuries of dependence, instinctively feels that, while everything is open to man, very little is open to her. She comes into the arena with a leaden sword; in most cases she hardly has energy to struggle.

A few days ago, when Britain was floating a large war loan, one woman told me that she could not understand its terms. We went into them together and she found that she understood perfectly. She was surprised. She had always assumed that she did not understand finance, and the assumption had kept her down, prevented her from understanding it. Likewise, and until they try, many women think they cannot read maps and time-tables.

With that heredity environment has coalesced, and I think no one will deny that a continuous suggestion of helplessness and mental inferiority must affect woman. It means most during youth, when one is easily snubbed, when one looks up to one's elders. By the time one has found out one's elders it is generally too late; the imprint is made, and woman, looking upon herself as inferior, hands on to her daughters the old slavery that was in her for

bears' blood. To me this seems foolish, and during the past thirty or forty years a great many have come to think so too; they have shown it by opening wide to woman the doors of colleges, many occupations and professions. Many are to-day impatient because woman has not done enough, has not justified this new freedom. I think they are unjust; they do not understand that a generation of training and of relative liberty is not enough to undo evils neolithic in origin. All that we are doing to-day by opening gates to women is to counter-influence the old tradition, to implant in the woman of to-morrow the new faith that nothing is beyond her powers. It lies with the woman of to-day to make that faith so strong as to move mountains. I think she will succeed, for I doubt whether any mental power is inherent in sex. There are differences of degree, differences of quality; but I suspect that they are mainly due to sexual heredity, to environment, to suggestion, and that indeed, if I may trench upon biology, human creatures are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.

The evolution of woman toward mental assimilation with man, though particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was later, for the knights could not read and learning existed only among the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned nobleman; Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled the mediæval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up babies. Two hundred and

fifty years later the well-to-do woman had become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such as 'The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore.' She was growing significant in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes she took a bath. Round about 1850 she turned into the 'perfect lady' who kept an album bound in morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already the Brontës and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty years were out John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to the House of Com

mons.

To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service. She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless, more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is to be remoulded I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman than by man, simply because

that as a sex he is in power, and the people who are in power never want to alter anything.

Woman's rebellion is everywhere indicated: her brilliance, her failings, her unreasonableness, all these are excellent signs of her revolt. She is even revolting against her own beauty; often she neglects her clothes, her hair, her complexion, her teeth. This is a pity, but it must not be taken too seriously: men on active service grow beards, and woman in her emancipation campaign is still too busy to think of the art of charming. I suspect that as time passes and she suffers less intolerably from a sense of injustice, she will revert to the old graces. The art of charming was a response to convention; and of late years unconventionality, a great deal of which is ridiculous, has grown much more among women than among men. That is not wonderful, for there were so many things woman might not do. Almost any movement would bring her up against a barrier; that is why it seems that she does nothing in the world except break barriers. How genuine woman's rebellion is no man can say. It may be that woman's impulse toward male occupations and rights is only a reaction against the growing difficulty of gaining a mate, children, and a home. But I very much more believe that woman is straining toward a new order, that the swift evolution of her mind is leading her to contest more and more violently the assumption that there are ineradicable differences between the male and the female mind. As she grows more capable of grasping at education she will become more worthy of it; her intellect will harden, tend to resemble that of man; and so, having escaped from the emptiness of the past into the special fields which have been conceded her, she will make for broader fields, fields so vast that they will embrace the world.

I

CLOTHING is a human need second in importance only to food. Indeed it can be called second only because it lasts longer, and because, as the consumption of wear takes more time than the consumption of digestion, the need on any particular day is usually less urgent. Since it is a universal need it gives rise to great industries; while the conditions which cause international division of labor enable particular countries to manufacture for the rest of the world. Accordingly the textile trades have for centuries been largely export trades; and the woolens of England, the silks of France, and the linens of Holland and Germany found extensive markets abroad before the advent of steam and machinery. When the age of machinery came, a cheap supply at home of coal and iron gave so great an advantage to countries possessing it, that they found themselves able to continue to produce textiles for themselves and for foreign markets even if they used imported materials.

These considerations apply, it need hardly be said, very directly to the case of Germany. Though before the war the textile industries of that country still furnished about one eighth of the total exports of the Empire, they had been deprived of their pride of place at the head of the list by the marvelous expansion of the iron and machinery trades; and with the improvement in textile machinery there was, as in other countries, some slackening

But while the exports of these stuffs increased some 38 per cent, the population increased only 15 per cent.

The effect on a country of the loss of foreign markets depends naturally on the relative size of the home demand. So far as can be made out from German official statistics, the foreign sale, in the case of cotton goods, is between a third and a half of the whole; in the case of woolens, rather more than a quarter; in the case of silks, rather more than one half.

Of its place in national life a very imperfect idea is given by the numbers employed. A stoppage in the production of clothing must in the long run be as fatal as a stoppage in the production of food. Long before that point is reached, the slackening of output involves so much less demand for those other things which men produce to exchange for clothes. It implies a malaise, a discomfort, a feeling of straitened circumstances, which gradually spreads

itself over the whole of society. But even if we look only at the particular industries primarily concerned, the numbers involved are quite considerable. The last returns of the factory inspectors, for operatives engaged in textile factories employing at least ten workpeople, were, in round figures:1910, 911,000; 1911, 922,000; 1912, 947,000. But these figures do not include either persons employed in smaller workshops, or those working at home, or those with whom the occupation is a secondary one. If they could be added, the number would probably be found to be somewhere between 1,200,000 and 1,300,000. Intimately bound up with 'the textile industry' proper are the clothing trades, to which the inspectors assigned in 1910, 385,000; in 1911, 398,000; in 1912, 423,000. But in these trades there is notoriously a far larger proportion of home-workers and workers in small shops; probably the factory figures give not more than a quarter of the whole number who found employ

ment.

Rather more women than men are employed in the textile trades, and more than twice as many in the clothing trades; so that relatively fewer people are dependent on those at work than is the case in the heavier and better-paid industries mainly carried on by men. The last occupation census, that of 1907, made an attempt to ascertain the total number dependent on the several groups of trades and their proportion to the total population. The conclusion was a percentage of 3.1 for the textile group and 4.3 for the clothing group, or 7.4 for the two together. These percentages may look small at first sight; but on the same authority all the metal-producing trades accounted for only 4.6 per cent of the population, and all the engineering trades for 3.6 per cent. It will not be forgotten that, large as the manufactures of Ger

many are, agriculture still accounts for about a third of the whole population.

Not content with these census groupings, the well-known political writer Naumann attempted some years ago a fresh combination of census figures, and reached the conclusion that, counting those branches of the metal and engineering trades occupied in turning out textile machinery, somewhere about a tenth of the whole German population was concerned in, or dependent upon, the production of clothing and clothing materials. So far as dependence on earnings is concerned, this may be an overestimate. But even this fraction is far from giving a just impression of the direct and immediate importance of this side of the nation's economic activity. For the textile factories furnish the wares ('dry goods') for legions of retail traders — drapers, haberdashers, and the like. Nor can we leave out of sight the many thousands of the German population who have invested capital in textile mills and are, to that extent, dependent upon their success. In the years 19101912 there existed some 350 joint-stock companies in the textile trades proper, with a paid-up share capital rising from 616 million marks in the first of those years to 651 millions in the last, and earning on that capital the not unsatisfactory profit of 12.59, 7.87, and 5.36 per cent for the three years respectively, after the deduction of all losses on the part of every single company carrying on business.

II

Enough has been said to give a general impression of the place of textiles in German national life. Let us look more closely into the constitution of the industries themselves. Herein Germany differs from England in important respects. Each of the two main trades,

cotton and woolen, is more widely distributed over the country: there is nothing as yet resembling the almost complete concentration of the former in Lancashire and the latter in the West Riding. Cotton and wool, moreover, are not, in Germany, kept apart from one another, industrially or geographically, to anything like the same extent. And, finally, the briefer history of machine industry in Germany is evidenced by the survival of a certain amount of handloom weaving, especially of linens.

But the forces of capitalism pull in the same direction in Germany as elsewhere. The factory has almost displaced the domestic workshop in all the chief branches of textile manufacture, and there has been a steady movement toward geographical concentration. As in other countries, mills tend to multiply near coal; and when concentration has once set in, it is hastened and strengthened by transportation facilities and by the presence of subsidiary trades. And so, although there were thriving textile manufactures elsewhere, in Alsace, Württemberg, Bavaria, and even in Brandenburg, two provinces before the war stood out from the rest for the magnitude and compression of their textile activity. A portion, side by side, of Rhineland and Westphalia, with the woolen industries of Aachen, Barmen, and Elberfeld, was coming more and more to resemble industrially the West Riding of Yorkshire, though it was diversified by the silk of Crefeld and the cotton business which found its centre in MünchenGladbach. Similarly the southern half of the Kingdom of Saxony, with the adjacent petty territories, was coming to resemble Lancashire, and Chemnitz was a great cotton-spinning centre; though here again the other textile trades, with all sorts of half-woolens and other combinations of fibre, flourished in the same district.

Whether factory- or home-work, whether concentrated or scattered, all this extensive and expanding department of industrial life was almost entirely dependent, before the war, on the importation of raw material from overseas or from what have since become enemy countries. In the case of cotton this dependence was practically complete. The only other source of supply was Turkey; and the contribution from that country - larger in 1913 than usual

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was only one two-hundredand-thirtieth part of the total net importation. Asia Minor can certainly in time produce more cotton than it does; but it will first be necessary to carry out extensive works of irrigation.

Sheep's wool Germany does, to some small extent, produce for herself; but before the war the Empire certainly received nineteen twentieths of its supply from outside. For many years the number of its sheep has been steadily declining: from 25 millions in 1873 to less than 10 millions in 1900 and less than 6 millions at the last cattle census in 1912. The number can be only gradually increased, and even then not without a serious change in agricultural practice and a concurrent diminution of food-supplies other than mutton. Almost all the outside supply of wool came from overseas; and of that which came by land the only contribution from countries not now hostile was the few hundred tons from Austria-Hungary, amounting in 1913 to about a hundred-and-forty-sixth part of the total net import. Austria-Hungary has more sheep: about 13 to every 5 in her ally's territory. But considering that before the war Austria-Hungary herself imported two thirds of her requirements, it is most improbable that in time of war she will be able to spare any quantity worth considering.

Silk is for Germany entirely a foreign product. About two thirds of it