tern worker.

CHAPTER XXI.

PRESENT AND FUTURE.

At the first glance, and even when longer survey has been made, both
Paris and Berlin,--and these may stand as the representative Continental
cities,--seem to offer every possible facility for the work of women.
Everywhere, behind counter, in shop or cafe, in the markets, on the
streets, wherever it is a question of any phase of the ordinary business
of life, women are in the ascendant, and would seem to have conquered
for themselves a larger place and better opportunities than either
England or America have to show. But, as investigation goes on, this
larger employment makes itself evident as obstacle rather than help to
the better forms of work, and the woman's shoulders bear not only her
natural burden, but that also belonging to the man. The army lays its
hand on the boy at sixteen or seventeen. The companies and regiments
perpetually moving from point to point in Paris seem to be composed
chiefly of boys; every student is enrolled, and the period of service
must always be deducted in any plan for life made by the family.

Naturally, then, these gaps are filled by women,--not only in all
ordinary avocations, but in the trades which are equally affected by
this perpetual drain. In every town of France or Germany where
manufacturing is of old or present date, the story is the same, and
women are the chief workers; but, in spite of this fact, the same
inequalities in wages prevail that are found in England and America,
while conditions include every form of the sharpest privation.

For England and America as well is the fact that law regulates or seeks
to regulate every detail, no matter how minute, and that the
manufacturer or artisan of any description is subject to such laws. On
the continent, save where gross wrongs have brought about some slight
attempt at regulation by the State, the law is merely a matter of
general principles, legislation simply indicating certain ends to be
accomplished, but leaving the means entirely in the hands of the heads
of industries. Germany has a far more clearly defined code than France;
but legislation, while it has touched upon child labor, has neglected
that of women-workers entirely. Within a year or two the report of the
Belgian commissioners has shown a state of things in the coal mines,
pictured with tremendous power by Zola in his novel "Germinal," but in
no sense a new story, since the conditions of Belgian worker