men, women, or children,--this including every form of trimming or other
adornment used in dress from artificial flowers to gimps, fringes, and
buttons. And now, having given this general outline, we may pass to the
stories of the units that make up this army,--stories chosen from
quarters where doubt is impossible, and confirmed often by the unwilling
testimony of those from whom the work has come, giving with them also
the necessary details of the trades they may represent, and seeking
first, last, and always, only the actual facts that make up the life of
the worker.

CHAPTER SECOND.

THE CASE OF ROSE HAGGERTY.

"The case of Rose Haggerty." So it stands on the little record-book in
which long ago certain facts began to have place, each one a count in
the indictment of the civilization of to-day, and each one the story not
only of Rose but of many another in like case. For the student of
conditions among working-women soon discovers that workers divide
themselves naturally into four classes: (1) those who have made
deliberate choice of a trade, fitted themselves carefully for it, and in
time become experts, certain of employment and often of becoming
themselves employers; (2) those who by death of relatives or other
accident of fortune have been thrown upon their own resources and accept
blindly the first means of support that offers, sometimes developing
unexpected power and meeting with the same success as the first class;
(3) those who have known no other life but that of work, and who accept
that to which they most incline with neither energy nor ability enough
to rise beyond a certain level; and (4) those who would not work at all
save for the pressure of poverty, and who make no effort to gain more
knowledge or to improve conditions. But the ebb and flow in this great
sea of toiling humanity wipes out all dividing lines, and each class so
shades into the next that formal division becomes impossible, but is
rather a series of interchanges with no confinement to fixed limits.
Often in passing from one trade to another, chance brings about much the
same result for each class, and no energy or patience of effort is
sufficient to check the inevitable descent into the valley of the
shadow, where despair walks forever hand in hand with endeavor.

This time had by no means come for Rose, with just enough of her
happy-go-lucky father's nature to make her essentially optimistic. Born
in a Cherry Street teneme