s or hiding away in attic and cellar, knows that out of such
conditions sudden fury and revolt is born, and that, if the prosperous
will not heed and help while they may, the time comes when help will be
with no choice of theirs. It is plain that even the most conservative
begin to feel this, and effort constantly takes more practical form;
but this is but the beginning of what must be,--the inauguration of a
social revolution in ideas, and one to which all civilization must come.

CHAPTER XIII.

WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES.

As investigation progresses, it becomes at times a question as to which
of two great factors must dominate the present status of women as
workers; competition, which blinds the eyes to anything but the surest
way of obtaining the proper per cent, or the inherited Anglo-Saxon
brutality, which, in its lowest form of manifestation, makes the English
wife-beater. It is certain that the English workingwoman has not only
the disabilities which her American sister also faces,--some inherent in
herself, and as many arising from the press of the present system,--but
added to this the apparent incapacity of the employer to see that they
have rights of any description whatsoever. Even the factory act and the
various attempts to legislate in behalf of women and child workers
strikes the average employer as a gross interference with his
constitutional rights. Where he can he evades. Where he cannot he is apt
to grow purple over the impertinence of meddling reformers who cannot
let well-enough alone.

Such a representative of one class of English employers is to be found
in a little street, not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, the great
newspaper centre, where all day long one meets authors, editors, and
journalists of every degree. Toward eight in the morning, as at the same
hour in the evening, another crowd is to be seen, made up of hundreds
upon hundreds of girls hurrying to the countless printing establishments
of every grade, which are to be found in every street and court opening
from or near Fleet Street. It is not newspaper interests alone that are
represented there. The Temple, Inner, Outer, and Middle, with the
magnificent group of buildings, also a part of the Temple's
workings--the new courts of law, have each and all their quota of law
printing, and a throng made up of every order of ability, from the
reader of Greek proof down to the folder of Mother Siegel's Almanac,
hurries through Fle