red idea that
the goal of every women's ambition should be fixed as matrimony. If the
low wages of women produced no further consequence, one might dismiss
the matter as not of essential importance; but inadequate pay has been
found too frequently to be a direct cause of prostitution. No girl can
well keep body and soul together on four dollars a week and some
business managers have been known to inform their women employees with
frankness that a "gentleman friend" is a necessary adjunct to a limited
income.

The women who suffer most from low wages are probably the teachers in
our primary schools. They start usually on a salary of about three
hundred and fifty dollars a year. For this each teacher performs all the
minute labour and bears all the nervous strain of instructing sixty
pupils six and a half hours a day and of correcting dozens of papers far
into the night. And when crime increases or the pupils are not
universally successful in business, the school teacher has the added
pleasure of getting blamed for it, being told that she ought to have
trained them better. These facts lend some colour to Mark Twain's sage
reflection that God at first made idiots--that was for practice; then
he made school boards.

One of the most interesting examples of recent evolution in the
industrial status of women is the decision of the Supreme Court of
Illinois in the so-called Ritchie Case. The last Legislature of Illinois
passed a law limiting to ten hours the working day of women in factories
and stores. Now, as far back as 1893, the Legislature had passed a
similar law limiting woman's labour to _eight_ hours; but the Supreme
Court in 1895 declared it unconstitutional on the ground that it was an
arbitrary and unreasonable interference with the right of women to
contract for the sale of their labour. When, therefore, this year a
ten-hour bill was tried, W.C. Ritchie, who had secured the nullification
of the act of 1893, again protested. The decision of the Court, rendered
April 21, 1910, is an excellent proof of the great advance made within
two decades in the position of women. Reversing completely its judgment
of 1895, the Court left far behind it mere technicalities of law and
found a sanction for its change of front in the experience of humanity
and of common sense. These are its conclusions:

"It is known to all men, and of what we know as men we cannot profess to
be ignorant as judges:

"That woman's physical structu