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need women physicians, employed by the year, whose duty and interest it will be to keep the family in health, and thus avoid the occasions for curing them when they are ill; and here is the safeguard for our girls-a person familiar with both the home life and school life of the children, and whose interest would forbid her to yield either to the weak affection of the mother, or the thoughtless ambition of the teacher. The familiar conversations that would naturally spring up between competent women physicians on the one side, and mothers, children, and cooks on the other, would contribute vastly to the improved diet and general sanitary habits of the family; and open a way to more rapid progress in determining the relation between different varieties of food and peculiarities in the mental and physical powers and appetites. We need creditable wages, given in employments for women other than teaching, in order to save our schools from being the receptacle of all women who have occasion to earn money. We need some half-time system in our schools, to provide for the pupils who have less health or less time; and also to secure for them teachers from a higher class of families, who find all-day work uncomfortably exhausting or confining. We need to raise the scale of feminine wages, in order to invite the application of time-saving inventions in women's work, as they are now employed in men's work. We need a wider range of work for women.

As a means to all this we need, and as the result of all of it we shall get, a recognition of feminine methods and standards, as well as of masculine methods and standards. If the specialties in the culture of women are worth preserving, it is because they have value; many of them, I am certain, have real value, and others

have a current value, so that we cannot at present dispense with them-if they have value, when we have a free and well-adjusted labor market, they will command their price. For bringing about these changes, we must have well-educated, wise women.

Our women, in matters of dress, are more completely the slaves of fashion than the women in any other civilized country. This is due to the necessity they feel for making a good personal impression. Their family position does comparatively little, either for or against them. They marry, or get forward in life, chiefly by making themselves personally agreeable. When we give them other means of influence than this, when we secure to them industrial and political power, these personal considerations will diminish in importance, and their minds will naturally turn away from them.

There are many things awry, many things that need to be improved, but we must be wise in our methods.

We cannot exactly imitate the English, nor do I believe it is worth doing. The Malthusian chorus of political economists suggests the notion that a nation may be over-physical. We want health for ourselves, and healthy tendencies for our descendants. Beyond this, we want to send our surplus force to the brain.

83 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill,

MARY E. BEEDY.

London W.

Θ

MENTAL ACTION

AND

PHYSICAL HEALTH.
Mrt.

By Mary Putnam Jacobi.

MENTAL ACTION

AND PHYSICAL HEALTH.

NONE can appreciate the weight attaching to the words of a distinguished member of an honored profession, as well as the younger members of that same profession. They know something of the toil needed to achieve a worthy reputation, and of the talent implied by the capacity for toil. They know how to discriminate between the careful opinions of mature and deliberate judgment, and the headlong assertions of rash busy-bodies and amateurs. They understand, because they feel, the inevitable esoterism that must persist at the kernel of all democracies, unless these degenerate into mere rabble and intellectual mob: they are the last, therefore, to maintain that one person's word is as good as another's; that common sense is competent to solve all questions; that freedom of thought means the right of all to think as they please. Knowing, on the contrary, the extreme complexity of all problems, and the facility with which the most upright judgment may become warped in meditating upon them, they are prepared to exact a long apprenticeship in thinking from those who assume the right to think in public, and a minute familiarity with facts from those who undertake to defend any opinion in re

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