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 SOME SOCIAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 195

thought to demean themselves by marrying Mrs. Dives' cook or maid.

Equally short-sighted and Utopian it is to expect imme- diate success from educational experiments upon that wage- earning population which we are now assimilating. Only traditions of culture and study, or ample command of time, or natural susceptibilities and ambitions bring real enjoyment of lectures, literature and historic and artistic collections. Although in many places libraries and museums are shut on Sundays and at night, although parks are so distant from the workingman's home that to take his family there for an outing costs fully one-tenth of his weekly pay, still there is unreasonable complaint and railing among unthinking people because, in spite of society's fiat that the lower orders shall profit by picture shows and reading rooms open at impos- sible hours, nevertheless beer gardens and concert halls of the worst character continue to be crowded. As if, to spiritual and aesthetic beauty ignorant eyes could be unsealed in one hour ! The poor are often strikingly sensitive to such forms of beauty as they know ; and they save every bright rag or battered flower for adornment. Since the Metropolitan Museum in New York has been accessible on Sundays and in the evenings, three-fifths of the annual visits occur at those times. London, too, is at last wheeling into line by throwing open its national collections of books and art on Sunday, the only day when the plain people can enjoy them.

It seems to me that educated women, more than any other element of the community, have the power to better the condi- tion of all wage-earners. They have ample command of time ; they have influence ; and some of them have intelligent sympathy with workers that does not degenerate into sentimentality. Hut it would be necessary first to discard the inhuman notion which good women often entertain and which is fostered by their conservatism and the traditions of their life that there is a fixed social gulf between leisure and toil. The privileged would have to meet their laboring sisters, whether in Eactoriea shops or