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as well as the words. There will be love songs, drinking songs, marching songs, hunting songs, folk songs-for the greater part old songs to traditional airs.

Mr. Ambrose White Vernon, professor of Biblical literature at Dartmouth college, is the author of a little volume on "The Religious Value of the Old Testament" which essays to show what there is left of the Old Testament, after the higher critics have had their will with it. The author's intention is excellent but he does not wholly avoid the infirmity of many writers in sympathy with the higher criticism in accepting as established some points which are yet in dispute and some which are purely conjectural. T. Y. Crowell & Co.

The dainty First Folio Edition of Shakespeare's plays, which T. Y. Crowell & Co. are publishing, reaches a round dozen of volumes with the publication of "Much Adoe About Nothing." Miss Charlotte Porter, one of the editors of the series, furnishes the Introduction; there are nearly one hundred pages of literary illustrations; and footnotes, a glossary, and some bits of selected criticism help the reader to a clearer understanding of the play. The text reproduces the First Folio of 1623, with the original spelling and punctuation.

Each new addition to "Everyman's Library" (E. P. Dutton & Co.) confirms the favorable impression made by the earlier issues. The little volumes are astonishingly cheap, but the cheapness is not purchased at the cost of type, paper or binding. The typography is attractive, and is set off by decorative titles and end-pieces. The

paper is opaque and of good quality, and the binding is as dainty as if the volumes were meant to be sold for three times their actual price. The library covers a wide range of books in the departments of philosophy and theology, poetry and drama, romance, science, travel, essays, biography, fiction, history and oratory, and young people's books, and by the happy device of a different color of cover for the different departments each group of books is easily distinguished, while general uniformity is preserved. The publishers have been fortunate in the writers whom they have secured to provide introductions for the several volumes. Some of the best-known and most brilliant of contemporary writers are in the list. What could have been better, for example, than the choice of Mr. Bryce to introduce the volume of Abraham Lincoln's Speeches? Or what could be more delightful than Mr. Chesterton's introductions to The Old Curiosity Shop and others of Dickens's stories? Readers who are familiar with the various series of reprints, whose name has come to be legion, will be interested to notice at how many points this series diverges from the well-worn paths of previous selections and presents works which, although of enduring value and interest have not been reproduced before in inexpensive form. Here, for instance, is the whole of The Spectator, beautifully printed, in four volumes, with an introduction and notes by Professor Gregory Smith; and here is Grote's History of Greece, a work of commanding importance and value, hitherto accessible only in expensive editions, complete in twelve volumes which make a pleasing row upon the shelf and tempt to perusal by their convenient size and clear typography.

SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME XXXV.

No. 3276 April 20, 1907.

CONTENTS.

1. Women and Politics: A Reply. By Eva Gore-Booth

FROM BEGINNING
Vol. CCLIII.

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NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER 131 Electric Waves and Wireless Telegraphy. By W. A. Shenstone CORNHILL MAGAZINE

134

BI.

The Enemy's Camp. Chapter III. (To be continued)

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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE 146

IV.

The First Earl of Lytton. By G. L. Strachey .

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VIII.

INDEPENDENT REVIEW
The Speech from the Throne. By Michael MacDonagh
MONTHLY REVIEW
A Milanese Mystery. Chapters I and II. By Charles Edwardes.
(To be concluded).
The Power of Suggestion
The Parting of the Ways. By Godfrey Burchett

153

156

CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL 168
SPECTATOR 176

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XI.

XII.

The Medical Practice of Savages. By Frederick Boyle OUTLOOK 186
The American Railway Position.

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XIII. Limerick

PUNCH

130

XIV.

XV.

Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. By Frederic Rowland Marvin
Madonna Laura. By Francesco Petrarcha.

130

Rendered into English

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FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually orwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the U.S. or Canada.

Postage to foreign countries in U. P. U. is 3 cents per copy or $1.56 per annum.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE Co.

Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents.

LIMERICK.

Here goes my love to Limerick! 'Tis there that I would be,

In the rare town, the fair town that lies beyond the sea.

Myself and darling Limerick we've been too far apart,

But the easy town, the breezy town, she always had my heart.

Of all the towns I ever saw, wherever

I was set,

There's only one, beneath the sun I never could forget.

I've shut my eyes in distant lands, and, oh, my mind was torn,

For I saw the streets of Limerick, the place where I was born.

But I was far away from her, the city of my joy,

Where once I wandered light as air, a little barefoot boy.

Since then I've worn the leather out,

but never trod so free

And the ascending dawn

Of an immortal Christ

Filled the blue heavens with light. Frederic Rowland Marvin.

MADONNA LAURA.

When all her golden beauty did unclose In Love's great noon and glory of desire,

Slipping her sheath, and yearning higher, higher,

Laura, my life, did leave me to my foes,

And living, lovely, disembodied, rose To the white wicket and the shimmering choir.

Ah, why does not that "last day" come and tire

My soul for Heaven?-that last day one knows

But as the first in Heaven. The same way

That all my thoughts go, and as feather light,

As long ago in Limerick, the only place My soul would rise, a pilgrim clean

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WOMEN AND POLITICS. A REPLY.

The writer of the article on "Women and Politics,” in the February number of this Review,* claims to speak for "a great though silent multitude of women," who shrink from their own enfranchisement because their already burdened strength would not be equal to the duties and responsibilities of voting at

parliamentary elections.

She claims exemption as the special privilege of weakness, and a concession to what she conceives to be the retiring, unworldly nature of a large number of women. And if it is argued that, if women were enfranchised, no woman could possibly be forced to vote against her will, we are met with the unanswerable assertion that "any woman could, of course, abstain from voting, but would this shelter her from being canvassed for her vote?" Alas, that no one tries to shelter us from canvassing other people, a far more unpleasant task!

As a simple matter of justice, it does not seem fair, or even reasonable, that the height of one's personal intellectual ambition should be enforced as the legal limit of another person's activity. It may be that "nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room:" but surely that is no reason why we should all be shut up in cells. I do not say there are not many who would prefer to have "protecting barriers between them and the rough outer world," and who are only troubled and alienated by any appeal to their sympathies from the wider life of the nation, and the monotonous and involved issues of our present industrial struggle. The controversy is a very ancient one. There have been contemplative orders, and hermits, and enthusiasts, in all ages, who have consciously limited their The Living Age, March 9.

sphere of action and shut out the business of the world, that they may the better pursue their own ideal of holiness and right living. I do not wish to undervalue the beauty of Miss Stephen's ideal of gentleness, piety, and devotion. But there is still a place in the world and a need for the sterner virtues, the more adventurous spirits. "Honor, anger, valor, fire," were the qualities that Stevenson exulted over in his wife. "She was," he says, "steeltrue and blade-straight." And surely, even in this domesticated generation there are some whose hearts will respond to the ring of those brave words.

Patient Grizzel may have her admirers, but who would not prefer to meet Christina of Sweden, or even Catherine de Médicis, or Maria Theresa, or Queen Elizabeth, or any other of the great stateswomen of the past. Indeed, there are many people who would go so far as to feel more interest in Catherine of Russia, in spite of her indefensible moral attitude. Sir Walter Scott, with all his enchantments, could not make a heroine of the fair but passive Rowena. Who does not remember how, in their first youthful reading of Ivanhoe, they wept over the sorrows of the fierce Rebecca, and skipped the parts about the mild and amiable Saxon lady. And while there are lovers of romance and poetry still left among us, there will be many who find their ideal of a woman's character in the heroic soul and indomitable will of the Antigone of Sophocles. "Yet remember in Women, too, dwells the spirit of battle," says Orestes in the play, and some of us are unregeneratedly proud that this is still one of the profound facts of human nature. But there is another side to this question. However unpleasant or

wearisome the idea of political activity may be, and probably is, to some women, as it is to some men, this distaste, founded on a peculiarity of temperament, must not blind our eyes to the wide and deep issues involved. In this work-a-day world, when women, as women, are in no way sheltered from the severity of the industrial struggle, it is idle to hold up to them as women an ideal of intellectual aloofness and seclusion. Miss Stephen speaks for those who "dread the suffrage," retiring, well-to-do people who fear change and exertion, and on whom the present industrial condition does not press heavily in practical life. Without answering her arguments in detail, I would appeal to her and others on behalf of those women who have something more serious to dread than the intellectual effort of voting at an election. Against the fastidious shrinking of the women who would feel their own enfranchisement too great a strain on their nerves, I would set the really urgent and practical suffering of another "very great and very silent multitude," the multitude of the women workers. The five millions of women who depend on their own exertions for their daily bread cannot afford the luxury of nun-like seclusion. There is no possibility of shelter or protection for them. They are, whether they like it or no, in the thick of the world's battle, and the very disqualification that Miss Stephen welcomes as a kind of privilege is a source of disablement and extreme weakness in industrial warfare. It is a fact of common observation among people interested in economic questions, that in every trade where women are employed (with one or two local exceptions such as the weavers in Lancashire) they are paid at a much lower rate than men can earn for doing the same work, or work of a slightly different nature requiring the same

amount of skill.

This is no question

of men doing more work than women, because this rule holds good of trades where piecework rates are given. Nowadays this question assumes a very serious aspect, because the old industrial conditions have changed, and it is a fact that, from one cause or another-the illness, drunkenness, or desertion, so lamentably common in our great towns-many and many a woman is forced into the position of breadwinner for others beside herself. Now it is no easy matter to keep several people on what is considered a quite good wage for a woman, 158. or 208. a week; but when we come to the multitude of smaller and lesser skilled trades that swarm in all industrial centres, such as tailoring, fancy-box-making, shirtmaking, folding and sewing, clay-pipe finishing, machining, and dozens of others, the rates in most cases are so low that the workers are never far removed from the starvation level, wages of 68. or 78. a week being the limit of the earnings of hundreds and thousands of women. In the Potteries from 78. to 10s. is a very usual wage for women, and the Cradley Heath chain-makers earn as little as 58. or 68. a week. The condition of things that has brought such a large body of workers to the extremes of poverty has also had its effect upon the professional world. Roughly speaking, it may be said that the present position of women works out in the industrial market in this way. Educated and qualified women are able to earn as much as skilled working men. The salary of many highschool teachers is no larger than the male spinner's wage of 21. a week, and often less than the wages of tailors' cutters. The wages of skilled working women at their best are about the same as those of unskilled working men, and at their worst a good deal lower; whilst the wages of the un

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