ions, but only with severe
effort and industry on Elena's part. For Gerda's optic nerve was now so
affected by strain, and she suffered so from indigestion, faintness, and
illness, that she was unable to go to the factory. She kept the house,
doing some sewing at home.

Elena's wages during the next six years, by struggle after struggle with
Mrs. Mendell, were raised to $7 a week after her thirteen years of
service. But she was nearly frantic with alarm over her failing health.
She was thin and frail, and eating almost nothing from gastritis.

At last a woman physician she saw told her she must stop work or she
would die. Her stomach was almost completely worn out. This doctor sent
her to a hospital, and visited Gerda and sent her, too, to a hospital.

This was four years ago. But both the young women are so broken down that
no efforts of public or private philanthropic medical care in the state
and the city have been able to restore their health. The doctors in whose
charge they have been say that these young women's strength is simply
worn out from these years of overwork and strain and poor and scanty
food, and that they can never again be really well.

They leave the hospitals or sanatoria for a few weeks of wage-earning,
six, at the most, to return again ill and unable to do any work at all.
Their life is now indeed a curious modern pilgrimage among the various
forms of charitable cure and the great charitable institutions of the
community which is entirely unable to return to them the strength they
have lost in its industries.

It may be pointed out that the exhaustion of these two workers has
involved a loss and expense not only to themselves, but to the factory
management, which has been obliged to employ in Elena's place two other
less skilful embroiderers, and to the taxpayers and the philanthropists
of New York who support charity hospitals and vacation homes.

These chronicles express as clearly as possible, in the order followed,
monotony and speeding in factory work among younger and older women,
operatives and hand-workers.

While one of the strangest results of the introduction of machinery into
modern industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and
initiative of the workers, it has often tended to devitalize and warp
these forces to the functions of machines, yet this result is so strange
that it cannot seem inevitable. Speeding for long hours at machines,
rather than machine labor it