odour is stifling.
The mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic with pain in the
shoulders and back before nine in the morning, and to watch the clock
creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that
has stood near one all day long. Yet it is not until the system has
become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one
can judge without bias. When I had grown so accustomed to the work that
I was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when I had
become so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer noticed it;
when any bed seemed good enough for the healthy sleep of a working girl,
and any food good enough to satisfy a hungry stomach, then and then only
I began to see that in the great unknown class there were a multitude of
classes which, aside from the ugliness of their esthetic surroundings
and the intellectual inactivity which the nature of their occupation
imposes, are not all to be pitied: they are a collection of human
individuals with like capacities to our own. The surroundings into which
they are born furnish little chance for them to develop their minds and
their tastes, but their souls suffer nothing from working in squalour
and sordidness. Certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested
kindness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude shone out in
the poverty-stricken wretches I met on my way, as the sun shines
glorious in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize some
rich man's fields.

My observations were confined chiefly to the women. Two things, however,
regarding the men I noticed as fixed rules. They were all breadwinners;
they worked because they needed the money to live; they supported
entirely the woman, wife or mother, of the household who did not work.
In many cases they contributed to the support of even the wage-earning
females of the family: the woman who does not work when she does not
need to work is provided for.

The women were divided into two general classes: Those who worked
because they needed to earn their living, and those who came to the
factories to be more independent than at home, to exercise their
coquetry and amuse themselves, to make pin money for luxuries. The men
formed a united class. They had a purpose in common. The women were in a
class with boys and with children. They had nothing in common but their
physical inferiority to man. The children were working from necessity,
the