one, and that a new, name would bring
a lower rate of pay. The practice of paying for oil needles, cotton
and silk had been introduced, a practice most irritating with its
paltry deduction from a girl's weekly wage. Next there was a system of
fines for what was called "mussing" work. Every one of these so-called
improvements in discipline was deftly utilized as an excuse for taking
so much off the girls' pay.

Patience became exhausted and the girls just walked out. Two-thirds of
the waist-makers in the city walked out. Of these about eighty-five
per cent., it is believed, were Jewish girls, the rest made up of
Italians with a few Poles. The girls who did not go out were mostly
Americans. One observer estimated at the time that about forty per
cent. of those in the trade were under twenty years of age, running
down to children of twelve.

When the workers, with no sort of warning or explanation, or making
any regular preliminary demands, just quit, it upset matters
considerably. A little girl waist-maker may appear to be a very
insignificant member of the community, but if you multiply her by
four thousand, her absence makes an appreciable gap in the industrial
machine, and its cogs fail to catch as accurately as heretofore. So
that even the decent manufacturers felt pretty badly, not so much
about the strike itself, as its, to them, inexplicable suddenness.
Such men were suffering, of course, largely for the deeds of their
more unscrupulous fellow-employers.

One manufacturer, for instance, had gained quite a reputation for
his donations to certain orphanages. These were to him a profitable
investment, seeing that the institutions served to provide him with a
supply of cheap labor. He had in his shop many orphans, who for two
reasons could hardly leave his employ. They had no friends to whom to
go, and they were also supposed to be under obligations of gratitude
to their benefactor-employer. One of his girl employes, to whom he
paid seven dollars a week, turned out for that wage twelve dollars'
worth of work. This fact the employer admitted, justifying himself by
saying that he was supporting her brother in an orphanage.

It was a hard winter, and the first week of the strike wore away
without a sign of hope. Public opinion was slow to rouse, and the
newspapers were definitely adverse. The general view seemed to be that
such a strike was an intolerable nuisance, if not something worse. At
length the conservative