Page:The Education and Employment of Women.djvu/15

15 or Australia, than in standing behind an English counter or plaiting straw. To take only the trades connected with women's dress and such matters, the census of 1861 gives the following numbers of men employed in trades, some of which would seem as distinctly appropriate to the one sex, as soldiering and sailoring to the other.

Disabilities of sex are parallel to disabilities of creed, and the economical results are likely to be the same. Silk weaving was driven into England by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and I believe that now several light trades are being driven out of England by the industrial prescription of women. "But supposing," says Miss Boucherett, "that the competition for employment were so great that whatever was added to the prosperity of one sex must be deducted from that of the other, is it just that the whole of the suffering thus caused should be laid upon the weaker half of humanity? How great a contrast is there between the spirit of Christianity, and the course of conduct too frequently pursued in this our country!"

"Be just before you are chivalrous," many a woman is tempted to exclaim, when she finds every door through which