laborious than the old as the world feared. And this war has somehow brought about the most undreamed of readjustments. In a London tube station I came upon one of them: my startled gaze encountered a man on his knees scrubbing the floor and a woman at the ticket window taking tickets!
Do you know, the more I see of the woman in industry, the more it looks to me as if she could stand it. Anyhow, she's stronger than she used to be. One insurance society at Manchester with 26,000 members found that it paid out for sickness benefits in 1915, £300 less than in 1914. The insurance actuary attributed the improved health to the better food and better clothing the members were now able to buy through the wages they were receiving in the munitions factories. The annual report of Great Britain's chief inspector of factories and workshops for 1916, commenting on the good health of the women employés, observes: "There can be little doubt that the high wages and the better food they have been able to enjoy in consequence, have done much to bring about this result." And you don't find among employers any more the complaint that women employés are less reliable than men because of their more frequent absences on account of illness. Very likely they may once have been so. Only a very strong woman could have been equal to the old overstrain of a man's work in the shop plus a woman's work in the home. And there was often a marked lowering of her vitality and efficiency. But the new improved man's size wage envelope is
