of the worker; and the story of hopeless decay
and collapse must be ours also, if different ideals do not rise to fill
the place of this Golden Calf to which all have bent the knee. There is
not a girl old enough to work at all who does not dream of a possible
future in which work will cease and ease and luxury take its place. The
boy content with a trade, the man or woman accepting simple living and
its limitations contentedly, is counted fool. To get money, and always
more and more money, is the one ambition; and in this mad rush toward
the golden fountain, gentle virtues are trampled under foot, and men
count no armor of honest thought worth wearing unless it be fringed with
bullion. The shop-girl must have her cotton velvet and her glass
substitutes for diamonds. The lines of caste are drawn as sharply with
her as in the ascending grades through which she hopes to pass. Labor is
curse; never the blessing that it may bear when accepted man's chief
good, and used as developing, not as destroying power.

Never till men see and believe that the fortune made by mere sharpness
and unscrupulousness, the fruit not of honest labor but of pure
speculation, is a burning disgrace to its owner, a plague-spot in
civilization, shall we be able to convince girl or woman that labor is
honorable, and better gains possible than any involved in merely getting
on. Never till this furious fight for success, this system of
competition which kills all regard for the individual, demanding only a
machine capable of so much net product,--never till these and all
methods of like nature have ceased to have place, or right to existence,
can we count ourselves civilized or hope to better the conditions that
now baffle us. No church, no mission, no improved home, no guild or any
other form of mitigation means anything till the whole system of thought
is reconstructed, and we come to some sense of what the eternal verities
really are.

It is easy for a woman to be kind and long-suffering, but the women who
can be just to themselves, as well as to others, we can count on our
fingers. Yet justice is the one demand in this life of to-day, and not
one of us who shrinks and shudders at the thought of what women-workers
are enduring but has it in her power to lessen the great sum of
wretchedness; to begin for some one the work of education into just
thinking and just living. Sweeping changes may not be possible. But
beginning is always possible; and no