and young from impure water. The trouble is
that their effects permeate in ways difficult for the unwilling eye to
see.

Perhaps in the long run, one of the most harmful phases of modern
civilization is this very contentment of not only the workers, but the
employer and society at large, under conditions which are not building
up a wholesome, healthy, intelligent population. Indeed, it is not so
much the fault of modern industrialism as such. Perhaps it is because
there are so many people in the world and the ability of us human
beings, cave men only ten thousand years ago, to care for so many
people has not increased with the same rapidity as the population. Our
numbers have outrun our capacities. Twentieth century development
calls for large-scale organization for which the human mind has shown
itself inadequate.

It is well to keep in mind that no situation is the product of its own
day. The working woman, for instance, we have had with us since the
beginning of women--and they began a good spell ago. The problem of
the working woman, as we think of it to-day, began with the beginning
of modern industry. Nor is it possible to view her past without
realizing that the tendency has ever been, with but few interruptions,
toward improvement.

In the early factory days in our country it is known that women rose
at four, took their breakfast with them to the mills, and by five were
hard at work in badly constructed buildings, badly heated, badly
lighted. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty there was an hour for
breakfast, at noon half an hour, and from then on steady work until
half past seven at night. It would be perhaps eight o'clock before the
mill girls reached home, sometimes too tired to stay awake till the
end of supper. Later, hours were more generally from five in the
morning until seven at night. In Lowell the girls worked two hours
before breakfast and went back to the mills again in the evening after
supper. By 1850 twelve hours had come to be the average working
day.[1]

[Footnote 1: Abbot, _Women in Industry_.]

Wages were very low--around seventy-five cents or a dollar a week with
board. Mills and factories were accustomed to provide room and board
in the corporation boarding houses, poorly constructed, ill-ventilated
buildings, girls often sleeping six and eight in a room. In 1836 it
was estimated that the average wage for women in industry (excluding
board) was thirty-seven and one-half cents a da