is fact as we will; bear testimony to the inefficiency and
incompetency of the workers; admit every trial and perplexity of
employers, every effort to better conditions, yet there remains in the
background always this shadow, in which the woman who elects to earn
an honest living must walk. No more heroic battle has ever been fought
than this daily one, waged silently and uncomplainingly in our midst
by these workers. Their lot is all part of the general evolution from
disorder, ignorance, and indifference, into the larger life, opening
so slowly that impatient spirits demand dynamite to hasten the
process, but as surely as the earth marches forever on its round
toward that central sun that draws each smallest star of that system
we call our universe.

It is certain that this is a transition period; that material
conditions born of a phenomenal material progress have deadened the
sense as to what constitutes real progress, and that the working-woman
of to-day contends not only with visible but invisible obstacles, the
nature of which we are but just beginning to discern. Twenty years ago
one of the wisest of modern French thinkers, M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu,
wrote of women wage-earners: "From the economic point of view, woman,
who has next to no material force, and whose arms are advantageously
replaced by the least machine, can have useful place and obtain fair
remuneration only by the development of the best qualities of her
intelligence. It is the inexorable law of our civilization--the
principle and formula even of social progress, that _mechanical
engines are to accomplish every operation of human labor which does
not proceed directly from the mind_. The hand of man is each day
deprived of a portion of its original task, but this general gain is a
loss for the particular and for the classes whose only instrument of
labor is a pair of feeble arms."

Untrained intelligence finds earning a more and more difficult task,
and for all of us it has become plain, that in the mighty problem
given us by a civilization which at so many points fails to civilize,
every force must be brought to bear upon its solution. These pale,
anaemic, undeveloped girls swarming in factory and shop, are the
mothers of a large part of the coming generation, defrauded before
birth of all the elements that make strong bodies and teachable souls.
It is not alone the present with which we deal. Out of the future
comes a demand as instant, and justic