which are the
basis of their different nervous constitution. It is sufficiently clear
to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the
piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries
have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will
get a setback.

But not merely good conditions, not merely a living wage, not merely a
ten or an eight hour day--all that self-government in the shop can bring
is the object of the Women's Trade Union League.

"The chief social gain of the union shop," says Mrs. Robins, "is not
its generally better wages and shorter hours, but rather the incentive
it offers for initiative and social leadership, the call it makes,
through the common industrial relationship and the common hope, upon the
moral and reasoning faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence
and group strength it develops. In every workshop of say thirty girls
there is undreamed of initiative and capacity for social leadership and
control--unknown wealth of intellectual and moral resources."

It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory
girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a
painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties.
It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital
faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other
career open to them.

To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. No
benefaction originating in the philanthropic motives of middle-class
people, no enterprise of patronage, will ever have any such meaning. A
movement, to have such meaning, must be of the working class, and by the
working class, as well as for the working class. It must be imbued with
working-class feeling, and it must subserve working-class ideals.

It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that she has seen this. She has
gone to the workers to learn rather than to teach--she has sought to
unfold the ideals and capacities latent in working girls rather than
impress upon them the alien ideals and capacities of another class.

"Just"--it is Mrs. Robins that speaks--"as under a despotic church and
a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was
denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and
moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with
incalculable loss to the individual and t