ral
rule, unless it be explainable upon the logical theory that the skill
necessary for the making of artificial flowers is found only in a vastly
superior class of girls. The flower-girls I met at Rosenberg's were,
without exception, wholesome-minded and pure-hearted. They knew how to
cook, as they had ample opportunity of proving at our luncheons and
dinners during those four busy, happy weeks. I never met factory-girls
in any other line of employment who knew how to make a cup of tea or
coffee that was fit to drink. The flower-girls gave every evidence of
having come from homes which, humble though many of them must have been,
were nevertheless well-ordered and clean. The girls I met in other
places seemed never to have lived in homes at all.

In the telling of the obscene story, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and
Protestant, were equally guilty.

That the responsibility for these conditions of moral as well as
physical wretchedness is fundamentally attributable to our present
socio-economic system is a fact that has been stated so often before,
and by writers who by right of specialized knowledge and scientific
training are so much better equipped to discuss social economics than I
may ever hope to be, that I need not repeat the axiom here. Nor would it
be any more becoming for me to enter into any discussion of the various
theories upon which the economists and the social reformers base their
various projects for the reconstruction of the present system.
Personally I have a strong prejudice in favor of the trades-union. I
believe that working women should awaken as quickly as possible to the
advantages to be derived from organization of the industries in which
they are employed. But I seem to be alone in my cherished desire. The
women and girls I have worked with in New York do not view the
trades-union as their more progressive and enlightened sisters of
Chicago and the West generally choose to regard it. Chicago alone shows
a roster of nearly forty thousand women and girls who are organized into
unions of their own, officered by themselves and with their own feminine
"walking delegates." I recently spent four weeks among these
trades-unions, numbering thirty-five distinct women's organizations, and
I found, everywhere I went, the same enthusiasm for, and the same
superior degree of intelligence regarding, the aim and object of the
organization idea.

As for the working women of New York, they have so far refused to