ing to make hay while the sun was shining? It is the common principle of successful commerce. Add to this fact another, viz: That during the summer months and all the months of the strike these operators and dealers were forced to lose money because they had and could get no coal to sell. Their teams were kept comparatively idle, like whole herds of mules in the coal regions, all their expenses went on or nearly all, but by reason of the mad and wicked action of John Mitchell & Co. they were doing no business and constantly losing money. No benevolent subscription was started to help them. They were simply accused by fools who blamed them instead of Mitchell for the shortage in coal. I say, in view of all the facts, I do not blame these dealers for taking advantage of our necessities and charging us three times more for coal than it was ordinarily worth.

If you want to find the real conspirators against the public, against the operators and against all trade and all men and all human interests, go to those early meetings of John Mitchell & Co., in which the first steps toward the strike were discussed and finally agreed upon. There were the real conspirators, the traitors to public comfort and peace, sulking and skulking in their dark holes; they plotted, built upon the sympathy of the American people and resolved to risk a fight which they had really lost when President Roosevelt called for the Arbitration Committee, but John Mitchell & Co., like the burrowing, underground, blind moles they are, will try it again and soon as possible, unless some dear Providence shall work out the German atheist's plan, and "shoot them down like dogs."

Later.—February 16th.—Since writing the foregoing, various counsel for the coal operators and non-union miners, the Miners' Union, etc., etc., have made able and characteristic speeches in favor of their clients. Mr. Baer also made a final and very able statement of the position of the representatives of capital in the coal regions. Most of all this I have read, only to be confirmed in the position taken in this article, viz: That John Mitchell and his pals of the Miners' Union, are absolutely, exclusively and savagely to blame: first, for the strike called in their interest and not at all to benefit the laboring man in the mines or elsewhere; second, that John Mitchell and his pals are to blame for all the miseries that the shortage in coal has brought upon the people. That they are to blame for the mil Her very excess of virtue makes her a dulling, deadening influence. She does not believe in all these complications in life; a thing is right or else it is wrong, and there the matter ends. Her ultimate appeal is to what she calls "common sense," in which, like most other people, she is apt to claim a monopoly. It is a hard-worked quality, but, since it may perhaps best be defined as the power of forming empirical judgments, often a very limited and illusory one when the data are insufficient or unfamiliar.

A woman's life is necessarily concerned with many petty details and trivial interests, and the scheme of her education generally excludes those subjects which would involve large generalizations and increase the scope of her mental operations, such as Political Economy, Ethics, Psychology and the more far-reaching conclusions of Science. And it is this, even more than over-sensitiveness to public opinion or a shrinking from the echo of her own footsteps over untrodden ground, which narrows the extent of feminine mental development.

Women have very often a good mental appetite and no digestion. They consume a whole library of books and are still lean. They are slow to perceive that the raw and unassimilated facts are useless, and do not go to enrich the mental life or build up the moral fiber. Give a woman a book on a large subject, and she will frequently pick out the isolated facts without the smallest idea of their bearing on the whole. She has probably an aptitude for picturesque detail, a sympathetic appreciation of the dramatic force of a situation, but cause and effect she ignores.

Buckle remarks that the English limit their knowledge too exclusively to the acquisition of facts, and it seems to me that this race characteristic is accentuated in its women.

In all sciences the knowledge of particulars must precede that of generals. In primitive communities phenomena are merely observed and commented on as isolated and unconnected. It is left for higher mental development to perceive the mutual relation of all knowledge, the correlation of all forces, and to group the unconnected data into one perfect whole. Feminine development is very apt to be arrested short of this stage.

A year or two ago we all read "La Vie Intime d'Amiel," a book full of striking and beautiful thoughts, the revelation of a mind penetrated with the love of knowledge, sensitive to the beauty of nature, ardently receptive, gifted with grace of expression, yet with limitations which, it has often struck me, are singularly similar to those of the best feminine intellects of the day. He was weighed down with the melancholy of the "weltmude," dissatisfied with the good that is not perfection, imagining ever, yet failing to create. And the reason of the failure he perpetually bewails lies, it seems to me, in his efforts to reconcile conflicting systems and schools. He cannot separate what strikes his fancy from what convinces his reason, and goes a little way with every one in turn. The defect is a curiously feminine one.

Many maintain, not wholly without reason, that the cultivation of larger ideas and wider views is, to a woman, not only difficult, but productive of actual suffering. "The higher development of civilization," says Lotze, in his great "Microcosmos," "entails greater variety of individuality, and with it greater susceptibility to offense from the peculiarities of others."

What could be more disastrous for all wives and daughters? "Their domestic and social happiness depends very much on their adaptability to circumstances and their pliancy to the moods of others. They lead a life of "odd jobs" and interruptions. Their days consist not of hours, but of intervals of ten minutes, and anything like steady application is often impossible.

But, on the other hand, parallel with the growing variety of individuality runs the keener sense of the interdependence of mankind, of the closely woven texture of our social tissue. The value of human sympathy is perhaps even too keenly felt by this generation. The tendency of recent thought has led to the idealization even to divinity of the sacred ties which bind man to man; it seeks to expand our great world-wide sin of selfishness till it shall embrace the interests of all mankind, almost to the exclusion of the self in which it originated, and so merge by slow and imperceptible degrees into the much-needed virtue of charity. And such sympathy is essentially a womanly attribute.

The poor philosopher, male or female, is often sneered at because he has entered a world his critics have no glimpse of. They are still more contemptuous should he allow this world's trifles to ruffle his philosophical serenity. Yet it is not always for the trifles themselves, my sisters, but because they jar with that longing for perfect love which is the essence of all philoso