ar, include cash girls
and the least intelligent class. It is this class that suffer most
from the fine system, since punctuality and thoroughness are the
result of educated intelligence. The largest number earn from two to
two hundred and fifty dollars, and, as has been said, lose an average
of thirty days in the year. The highest average wage, $6.91, is little
more than subsistence, and the lowest, $4.05, is far less than decent
subsistence requires.

Absolute violation of sanitary laws, overcrowding, and a host of other
evils are specified as part of the factory system. Deliberate cruelty
and injustice are met only now and then, but competition forces the
working in as inexpensive a manner as possible, and so makes cruelty
and injustice necessary to continued existence of the employer as an
industrial factor. Home conditions are seldom beyond tolerable. For
the most part, they must be summed up as intolerable. Inspection, the
efficiency of which has greatly increased; the demand, by the
organized charities, for women inspectors, and the gradual growth of
popular interest, are bringing about a few improvements, but the mass
at all points are as stated. Ignorance and the vices that go with
ignorance, want of thoroughness, unpunctuality, thriftlessness, and
improvidence, are all in the count against the poorer order of worker,
but for the most part they are living honest, self-respecting,
infinitely dreary lives. This fact is emphasized in every Labor Report
in which the subject of women wage-workers is treated, and impersonal
as figures are usually counted to be, from each one sounds a warning
which, if unheeded, must in the end mean the disaster to which these
returns point as inevitable. Even in Colorado, a State not included in
the government report, where opportunity is larger, it has been said,
than at almost any other point in the Union, Mr. Driscoll's report for
that State shows an average wage for women of about six dollars,
which, considering the cost of living, is less than the New York
rate.

It is a popular belief that the working class forms a large proportion
of the numbers who fill the houses of prostitution, and that
"night-walkers" are made up largely from the same class. Nothing could
be farther from the truth than the last statement, the falsity of
which was demonstrated in the fifteenth annual report of the
Massachusetts Bureau of Labor, its testimony being confirmed and
repeated in the report we