among women anyone) should have for us a message of her own, striking to the heart—repeats, in a less effective cadence, what she has learned from him.

The work of Beatrice Webb is the prose of revolution. The work of Ibsen is its poetry. Beatrice Webb has performed her work—one comes to feel—as well as Ibsen has his. And one wonders if, after all, the prose is not that which women are best endowed to succeed in.

A book review (written by a woman) which I have at hand contains some generalizations which bear on the subject. "This is a woman's book [says the reviewer], and a book which could only have been written by a woman, though it is singularly devoid of most of the qualities which are usually recognized as feminine. For romance and sentiment do not properly lie in the woman's domain. She deals, when she is herself, with the material facts of the life she knows. Her talent is to exhibit them in the remorseless light of reality and shorn of all the glamour of idealism. Great and poetical imagination rarely informs her art, but within the strictness of its limits it lives by an intense and scrupulous sincerity of observation and an uncompromising recognition of the logic of existence."

If that is true, shall we not then expect a future more largely influenced by women to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact quality, the splendid realism characteristic of woman "when she is herself"?

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CHAPTER VI

MARGARET DREIER ROBINS

The work of Margaret Dreier Robins has been done in the National Women's Trade Union League. It might be supposed that the aim of such an organization is sufficiently explicit in its title: to get higher wages and shorter hours. But I fancy that it would be a truer thing to say that its aim is to bring into being that ideal of American womanhood which Walt Whitman described: