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Is it any wonder, if she has not the mental elasticity to cope with male competitors? Mental elasticity is a result of mental adjustments, it infers variety of experience. Is it any wonder that she is a creature of detail? The wonder is that she can master the details. She has not an inherent sense of justice, because justice rests upon a conception of the interests of those differently situated from oneself, and her interests have been confined as closely as possible to those of her own kind and class. She has been excluded from democracy. And how can she excel by the cold reasoning faculty when life has put her under so little necessity of developing it?

In business she needs these qualities and the information she has missed along with them. Business is founded on facts, not on propriety and affection. In the field of literature and journalism woman has stumbled upon a substitute for her lack of general knowledge. Not a successful news editor, she has become a successful woman's editor. She has capitalized the slender store of information which she monopolizes the traditional interests of women. Likewise the woman fiction writer and the woman poet find success in writing for women and children. So does the feminine writer of advertising copy.

It is poor consolation, this selling of one's femininity, but it is the only way for most of us to compete with men at present. Since it is estimated that ninety-nine per cent. of the world's buying is done by women, a knowledge of feminine psychology should have commercial value outside the fields of literature and journalism. Woman's greatest immediate opportunity may be to extend enterprises which depend for their success upon pleasing women and understanding the conditions of their lives.

Fortunately, women's education will be less restricted in the future. The use of the franchise provides a contact with a variety of problems, and there is the increasing realization of the cost of feminine folly. Woman cannot be more of a failure in business than she has been in the home. Not only has the home failed to keep pace in cleanliness and economy, with business and applied science, but it has failed in its primary function as a place to bring up children. Child delinquency has increased, a larger and larger percentage of our criminals is recruited from youth. This is the

fault of our modern civilization, rather than of women, but intelligent mothers are needed to offset the new conditions.

And there is still much to be done to decrease infant mortality. It is no coincidence that the same twenty years in which so much has been accomplished in reducing the infant death rate have also been marked by the increased freedom of women. Propaganda for child preservation and child training needs for its promulgation an intelligent womanhood. America is in little danger of depopulation, but she is sure to feel the influence of European thought, of countries trying to build up their stock after the war. The Caucasian peoples can no longer afford the entirely "feminine" woman. She cannot be depended upon to follow instructions beyond her comprehension. She will do so for months and then in a fit of impatience and optimism will kill her sick baby by feeding it something against which the doctor had not thought necessary to warn her. The lost life represents a loss in time, money, professional skill, and human emotion. Our lives have grown too keenly competitive (as well as too humane) to tolerate the loss. The cold reasoning faculty is needed in the home. Consequently we can predict increased freedom and education for women, and a subsequent increase in their business success. The objection that marriage would be responsible for a high turn-over of women employees has proved only theoretical. In spite of their tendency to stop work when they marry, women are better stickers than their brothers, so that the belief, still largely prevalent, that it is hardly worth an employer's time to train a woman for an important position, is fallacious and bound to be so discovered.

Moreover, as the majority of women workers marry by the time they are twenty-three, these home-makers are drawn from a class that is relatively inexperienced and easy to replace. It is doubtful if many have been seriously trained for an important position. The work of switchboard operator, typist, file clerk, stenographer, is not exhilarating and seldom serves as a steppingstone to highly desirable positions or why would ambitious young men leave such work to women? It may be that instead of marriage depleting the ranks of such workers, the possibility of marriage of business being only a stop-gap may make it easy to

fill many jobs that otherwise would go begging. There was a time when such office work was done by men, but there was much less of it. Big business and the "feminine invasion of business" have gone hand in hand and are likely to continue to do so. It will be interesting to watch the effect upon business as more and more girls realize that they are probably destined to be wageearners after marriage. It should mean better preparation and a more serious attitude on the part of the more intelligent, and a general effort through the different grades of workers to struggle into the next grade—that is, into work they consider financially and mentally satisfactory.

Finally, remember that women are often handicapped by an entirely laudable idealism, by obligations which the ambitious and hard-pressed business man feels compelled to avoid. Woman, too, knows that success is usually to be obtained only by subordinating other things to it. But she also knows that not all the success in the world could make up for having lost, or missed, her friends. And not all the friends in the world could make up for having lost, or missed, herself.

We would not wish women to outgrow this idealism. But are not men, too, coming to believe that it is possible to pay too much for business success? If women learn, as men have learned, the usefulness of material success in advancing individual, family, social, national and religious ends, may not the feminine and masculine ideals become blended into one set of values for both sexes?

To sum up, the successful business woman will not be a sudden apparition. The education of public expectation is slow. The responsibility for the so-called "subjection of women" lies neither with herself nor with man, but with the importance of physical might in an order that has long since vanished. When the ideals and expectations of the old order have also vanished, when woman is no longer coddled, no longer coddles herself, then we shall be able to judge whether or not there was anything inherent in woman to account for her slowness in achieving success in busiUntil then we have no possible way of knowing.

ness.

SHERIDAN-WHOM THE GODS LOVED

BY J. BROOKS ATKINSON

I

UPON Richard Brinsley Sheridan the gods let themselves go with a jaunty, ironic flourish. They made him fascinating; they made him a study in superlatives. What other figure in all English literature can match him for sheer volatility? For a few maddening seconds Sheridan danced on the icy pinnacle of Cosmopolis. Of face and figure he was so beautiful that his eldest sister was never unmindful of "the glow of health, his eyes, the finest in the world, and soft as a tender and affectionate heart could render them." Of personality he was so attractive, at once so brilliant and charming, that even men could feel melancholy when he went away. “After you had been gone an hour," wrote his friend J. Richardson, "I got moped damnably." Before his twenty-second birthday he had fought two duels with a middle-aged scoundrel over a captivating young singer, the most beautiful of her day, and married her while his closest friend and a hundred others were wooing her with ardent verses. At twenty-six he had written two of the only three comedies that have survived on our stage since the time of Shakespeare. Ten years later he delivered in Parliament a speech epochal in English statesmanship. Yet when he was dying at the age of sixty-five, alienated from some of his friends and unsought by most others, only the stubborn persistence of his physician prevented the bailiff from arresting him in his sick-bed and carrying him off in the blankets to the spunging-house. Nor was this all the ignominy of his declining days. When he was to be buried his wife was so fearful (perhaps needlessly) lest he might be snubbed at his funeral that she wrote personal letters to many of the most distinguished, beseeching them to come. Byron wrote in his diary: "He has written the best comedy

(School for Scandal), the best opera (The Duenna-in my mind far before that St. Giles's lampoon, The Beggar's Opera), the best farce (The Critic-it is only too good for an after-piece), and the best address (Monologue on Garrick),—and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever conceived or heard in this country." At the moment when Byron was writing this panegyric, Sheridan was, as the result of his own indolence, profligacy and helplessness, afflicted by distresses from which he never recovered. One of his most lurid biographers, many of whom sprang gratuitously to the maw of the press the instant Thomas Moore's faithful study had appeared, asserts that on the day of the funeral procession a stranger squirmed into the house of mourning on the pretext of viewing Sheridan's corpse, touched the face with his bailiff's wand when the coffin was opened, and arrested the corpse "in the king's name" for a debt of £500! Well, perhaps and perhaps.

II

Although the Sheridan claquers were busy soon after his death, puffing their hero into a superman, they did not succeed. That nimble hack Earle, who wrote a colorful and sometimes specious book on Sheridan and signed himself "Octogenarian," hotly resisted the assertion that Sheridan was no scholar. Alas! his learning seemed all too feeble beyond the polite equipment of fashionable chaps of the day. He who wrote The Rivals at twenty-two was pronounced an "impenetrable dunce" by his Dublin schoolmaster. At Harrow, Dr. Parr, famous in his day and long after as a schoolmaster, found Sheridan indolent, shiftless and much too idle for learning. Such scholarship as he had, Sichel avows in an excellent biography, was "stealthy." Doubtless it was not family penury alone which kept this wit from essaying the university. He was disgusted by the spectacle of ponderous learning, such as that of Dr. Johnson, whom he called "a monster with a leaden eye and lumbered brain of Greek and Latin lore." A man of learning or profound respect for learning would not have been duped, even on the recommendation of Porson and Malone, into buying a Shakesperean forgery (Ireland's Vortigern and Rowena) and setting it on the stage of his theatre as genuine Eliza

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