vania firms.
The present New York season has been unusually dull, and now, on this
writing, early in August, many girls are discouraged on account of the
slight amounts they earn through slack work.

"But that is not the fault of the employers," said one of the workers.
"You must be reasonable for them. You cannot ask them for work they are
not able to obtain to give you." Her remark is quoted both from its
wisdom and for another purpose. She was the girl who will always be
disabled by the attack of her employer's thug. Her quiet and instinctive
mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers
had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious
generosity and nobility.

Looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its
profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be
its spirit. Something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a
mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit,
manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers' effort for better terms of
life.

"The most remarkable feature of the strike," says a writer in the
_Call_,[18] "is the absence of leaders. All the girls seem to be imbued
with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial
uprisings. One like all are ready to take the chairmanship,
secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison."

There has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers'
strike. Perhaps there never will be another quite like it again. When
every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have
all been admitted, the fact remains that the New York strike said, "All
for one and one for all," with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the
voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country--perhaps new
in the voice of the world. Wonderful it is to know that in that world
to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who,
in the meanest quarter of New York, on stinted food, in scanty clothes,
drained with faint health and overwork, could yet walk through her life,
giving away half of her wage by day to some one else, enjoying the
theatre at night, and, in the poorest circumstances, pouring her slight
strength out richly like a song for pleasure and devotion. Wonderful it
is to know that when Natalya Urusova was in darkness, hunger, fright, and
cold on Blackwell's Island, she still could be re