Meanwhile committees were appointed from each shop to settle upon a price list. As the quality of work differed in different shops, a uniform wage was impossible and had to be settled by each shop individually. When the hundreds of price lists were at last complete, meetings were arranged for each shop committee and their employers. Again the price list was discussed, and a compromise usually effected. In almost every shop, however, an increase of from 15 to 20 per cent. was granted.

Apart from wages, the contract insured significant improvements. Besides calling for recognition of the union it demanded full pay for legal holidays, limited night work during the rush season to eight P.M., abolished all Sunday work, did away with the inside contracting system, under which one girl took out work for several, and provided for a fair allotment of work in slack seasons.

After one hundred and ninety firms had signed up, and the majority of the strikers had returned to their shops, an attempt was made to settle with the still obdurate employers through arbitration, at the suggestion of the National Civic Federation.

Meanwhile picketing was going on; the pickets were being punished, not only with heavy fines, thus depleting the union's treasury, but with terms in the workhouse. Some of these criminals for principle were little girls in short skirts, and no attempt was made to separate them when in confinement from disorderly characters. But what was the result? The leaders saw to it that a photograph was taken of such a group, with "Workhouse Prisoners" pinned across the breast of each, and worn as a badge of honor, a diploma of achievement, and the newspapers were but too glad to print the picture. When that spirit of irrepressible energy and revolt once possesses men or women, punishment is converted into reward, disgrace transmuted into honor.

This it was, more even than the story of the wrongs endured, which had its effect on the public. In the rebound of feeling the illegality of the police behavior was admitted. The difficulties put in the way of the courageous little pickets led to the forming of parades, and the holding of meetings even in a class of society where no one had counted on receiving sympathy. The ladies of the rich and exclusive Colony Club learned from the girls themselves of the many disadvantages connected with waist-making. For instance that in the off season there was little regular work at all; and that all the time there were the fines and breakages. One girl told how she had been docked for a tucking foot, which, as she said, just wore out on her, "It wasn't really my fault," she concluded, "and I think the boss should look out for his own foots."

Said another: "When a girl comes five minutes late at my shop, she is compelled to go home. She may live outside of the city, it does not matter, she must go home and lose a day.

"We work eight days in the week. This may seem strange to you who know that there are only seven days in the week. But we work from seven in the morning till very late at night, when there's a rush, and sometimes we work a week and a half in one week."

The socialist women did yeoman service, protecting the pickets, attending the trials, speaking at meetings and taking a full share of the hard work. The organized suffragists and clubwomen were drawn into the thick of the fight. They spread the girls' story far and wide, raised money, helped to find bonds, and were rewarded by increased inspiration for their own propaganda.

The enormous extent of the strike, being, as it was, by far the largest uprising of women that has ever taken place upon this continent, while adding proportionately to the difficulties of conducting it to a successful issue, yet in the end deepened and intensified the lesson it conveyed.

In the end about three hundred shops signed up, but of these at least a hundred were lost during the first year. This was due, the workers say, partly to the terrible dullness in the trade following the strike, and partly to the fact that they were not entirely closed shops.

Since then, however, the organization has grown in strength. It was one of these coming under the protocol, covering the Ladies' Garment Workers, in so many branches, which was agreed to after the strikes in the needle trades of the winter of 1913. The name was changed from Ladies' Waist Makers, to Ladies' Waist and Dress Makers.

But the waist-makers' strike was not confined to New York. With the opening of their busy season, the New York manufacturers found themselves hard pressed to fill their orders, and they were making efforts to have the work done in other cities, not strike-bound. One of the cities in which they placed their orders was Philadelphia. It was with small success, however, for the spirit of unrest was spreading, and before many weeks were over, most of the Philadelphia waist-makers had followed the example of their New York sisters.

The girls were in many respects worse off in Philadelphia than in New York itself. Unions in the sewing trades were largely down and out there, and public opinion was opposed to organized labor.

When the disturbance did come, it was not so much the result of any clever policy deliberately thought out, as it was the sudden uprising and revolt of exasperated girls against a system of persistent cutting down extending over about four years. A cent would be taken off here, and a half-cent there, or two operations would be run into one, and the combined piece of work under one, and that a new, name would bring a lower rate of pay. The practice of paying for oil needles, cotton and silk had been introduced, a practice most irritating with its paltry deduction from a girl's weekly wage. Next there was a system of fines for what was called "mussing" work. Every one of these so-called improvements in discipline was deftly utilized as an excuse for taking so much off the girls' pay.

Patience became exhausted and the girls just walked out. Two-thirds of the waist-makers in the city walked out. Of these about eighty-five per cent., it is believed, were Jewish girls, the rest made up of Italians with a few Poles. The girls who did not go out were mostly Americans. One observer estimated at the time that about forty per cent. of those in the trade were under twenty years of age, running down to children of twelve.

When the workers, with no sort of warning or explanation, or making any regular preliminary demands, just quit, it upset matters considerably. A little girl waist-maker may appear to be a very insignificant member of the community, but if you multiply her by four thousand, her absence makes an appreciable gap in the industrial machine, and its cogs fail to catch as accurately as heretofore. So that even the decent manufacturers felt pretty badly, not so much about the strike itself, as its, to them, inexplicable suddenness. Such men were suffering, of course, largely for the deeds of their more unscrupulous fellow-employers.

One manufacturer, for instance, had gained quite a reputation for his donations to certain orphanages. These were to him a profitable investment, seeing that the institutions served to provide him with a supply of cheap labor. He had in his shop many orphans, who for two reasons could hardly leave his employ. They had no friends to whom to go, and they were also supposed to be under obligations of gratitude to their benefactor-employer. One of his girl employes, to whom he paid seven dollars a week, turned out for that wage twelve dollars' worth of work. This fact the employer admitted, justifying himself by saying that he was supporting her brother in an orphanage.

It was a hard winter, and the first week of the strike wore away without a sign of hope. Public opinion was slow to rouse, and the newspapers were definitely adverse. The general view seemed to be that such a strike was an intolerable nuisance, if not something worse. At length the conservative Ledger came out with a two-column editorial, outlining the situation, and from then on news of the various happenings, as they occurred, could be found in all the papers. But the girls were unorganized. There was no money, and they faced the first days of the new year in a mood of utter discouragement. Organizers from the International of the Ladies' Garment Workers had, however, come on from New York to take charge. The strikers were supported by the Central Labor Union of Philadelphia, under the leadership of the capable John J. Murphy, and representatives of the National Women's Trade Union League, in the persons of Mrs. Raymond Robins and Miss Agnes Nestor, were already on the scene.

In the struggle itself, the New York experiences were repeated. The fight went on slowly and stubbornly. Arrests occurred daily and still more arrests. Money was the pressing need, not only for food and rent, but to pay fines and to arrange for the constantly needed bonds to bail out arrested pickets. At length a group of prominent Philadelphia women headed by Mrs. George Biddle, enlisted the help of some leading lawyers, and an advisory council was formed for the protection of legal rights, and even for directing a backfire on lawbreaking employers by filing suits for damages. With such interest and such help money, too, was obtained. The residents of the College Settlement, especially Miss Anna Davies, the head resident, and Miss Anne Young, the members of the Consumers' League, the suffragists and the clubwomen all gave their help.

These women were moved to action by stories such as those of the little girl, whom her late employer had been begging to return to his deserted factory. "The boss, he say to me, 'You can't live if you not work.' And I say to the boss, 'I live not much on forty-nine cents a day.'"

As in New York, the police here overreached themselves in their zeal, and arrested a well-known society girl, whom they caught walking arm-in-arm with a striking waist-maker. Result, the utter discomfiture of the Director of Public Safety, and triumph for the fortunate reporters who got the good story.

An investigation into the price of food, made just then by one of the evening newspapers came in quite opportunely, forcing the public to wonder whether, after all, the girls were asking for any really higher wage, or whether they were not merely struggling to hold on to such a wage as would keep pace with the increasing prices of all sorts of food, fuel, lighting, the commonest clothing and the humblest shelter.

The strike had gone on for some weeks, when an effort was made to obtain an injunction forbidding the picketing of the Haber factory. This was finally to crush the strike and down the strikers. But in pressing for an injunction the manufacturers came up against a difficulty of their own making. The plea that had all along been urged upon the union had been the futility of trying to continue a strike that was not injuring the employers. "For," they had many times said, "we have plenty of workers, our factories are going full blast." Whereas the Haber witnesses in the injunction suit were bringing proof of how seriously the business was being injured through the success of the girl pickets in maintaining the strike, and, the money loss, they assured the court was to be reckoned up in thousands of dollars. This inconsistency impressed the judge, and the strikers had the chance of telling their story in open court. "Strikers' Day" was a public hearing of the whole story of the strike.

That night both sides got together, and began to discuss a working agreement. After twenty-five hours of conference between representatives of the Shirt Waist Makers' Union and of the Manufacturers' Association, an agreement was arrived at, giving the workers substantial gains; employment of all union workers in the shops without discrimination; a fifty-two-and-a-half-hour week and no work on Saturday afternoon; no charges for water, oil, needles or ordinary wear and tear on machinery; wages to be decided with the union for each particular shop, and all future grievances to be settled by a permanent Board of Arbitration; the agreement to run till May 1, 1911.

The workers' success was, unfortunately, not lasting. Owing to the want of efficient local leadership, the organization soon dropped to pieces. That gone, there was nothing left to stand between the toilers and the old relentless pressure of the competitive struggle, ever driving the employers to ask more, and ever compelling the wage-earners to yield more. The Philadelphia shirt-waist strike of 1910 furnishes a sad and convincing proof of how little is gained by the mere winning of a strike, however bravely fought, unless the strikers are able to keep a live organization together, the members cooeperating patiently and steadily, so as to handle the fresh shop difficulties which every week brings, in the spirit of mutual help as well as self-help.

These first Eastern strikes in the garment trades, although local in their incidence, were national in their effects. There had been so much that was dramatic and unusual in the rebellion of the workers, and it had been so effectively played up in the press of the entire country that by the time spring arrived and the strikes were really ended, and ended in both cities with very tangible benefits for the workers, there was hardly anyone who had not heard something about the great strikes, and who had not had their most deeply rooted opinions modified. It was an educational lesson on the grand scale. But the effects did not stop here. The impression upon the workers themselves everywhere was wholly unexpected. They had been encouraged and heartened to combine and thus help one another to obtain some measure of control over workshop and wages.

The echoes of the shirt-waist strikes had hardly died away, when there arose from another group of dissatisfied workers, the self-same cry for industrial justice.

There is no doubt that the Chicago strike which began among the makers of ready-made men's clothing in September, 1910, was the direct outcome of the strikes in New York and Philadelphia. While the Western uprising had many features in common with these, yet it presented difficulties all its own, and in its outcome won a unique success. Not only was the number of workers taking part greater than in the previous struggles, but, owing to the fact of a large number of the strikers being men, and a big proportion of these heads of families, the poverty and intense suffering resulting from months of unemployment extended over a far larger area. Also the variety of nationalities among the strikers added to the difficulties of conducting negotiations. Every bit of literature put out had to be printed in nine languages. And lastly, the want of harmony between certain of the national leaders of the union involved, and the deep distrust felt by some of the local workers and the strikers for a section of them provided a situation which for complexity it would be hard to match. That the long-continued struggle ended with so large a measure of success for the workers was in part owing to the extraordinary skill and unwearied patience displayed in its handling, and in part to the close and intimate cooeperation between the local strike leaders, both men and women, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Chicago Women's Trade Union League. Much also had been learned from recent experience in the strikes immediately preceding.

The immediate cause of the first striker going out was a cut in the price of making pockets, of a quarter of a cent. That was on September 22 in Shop 21, in the Hart, Schaffner and Marx factories. Three weeks later the strike had assumed such proportions that the officers of the United Garment Workers' District Council No. 6 were asking the Women's Trade Union League for speakers. The League organized its own Strike Committee to collect money, assist the pickets and secure publicity. At the instance of the League also an independent Citizens' Committee was formed.

In time of sorest need was found efficient leadership. The garment-workers of Chicago, in their earlier struggles with the manufacturers, had had no such powerful combination to assist them as came to their aid now, when a Joint Strike Conference controlled the situation, with representatives upon it from the United Garment Workers of America International Executive Board, from the Chicago District Council of the same organization, from the Special Order Garment Workers, the Ready Made Garment Workers, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Women's Trade Union League. The American Federation of Labor sent their organizer, Emmett Flood, the untiringly courageous and the ever hopeful.

The first step to be taken was to place before the public in clear and simple form the heterogeneous mass of grievances complained of. The Women's Trade Union League invited about a dozen of the girls to tell their story over a simple little breakfast. Within a week the story told to a handful was printed and distributed broadcast, prefaced, as it was, by an admirable introduction by the late Miss Katharine Coman, of Wellesley College, who happened to be in Chicago, and who was acting as chairman of the grievance committee. The Citizens' Committee, headed by Professor George Mead, followed with a statement, admitting the grievances and justifying the strike.

From then on the story lived on the front page of all the newspapers, and speakers to address unions, meetings of strikers, women's clubs and churches were in constant demand. Here again, the suffragist and the socialist women showed where their sympathies lay and of what mettle they were made. Visiting speakers, such as Miss Margaret Bondfield and Mrs. Philip Snowden, took their turn also. The socialist women of Chicago issued a special strike edition of the Daily Socialist. With the help of the striking girls as "newsies" they gathered in the city on one Saturday the handsome sum of $3,345. Another group of very poor Poles sent in regularly about two hundred dollars per week, sometimes the bulk of it in nickels and dimes. A sewing gathering composed of old ladies in one of the suburbs sewed industriously for weeks on quilts and coverings for the strikers. Some small children in a Wisconsin village were to have had a goose for their Christmas dinner, but hearing of little children who might have no dinner, sent the price of the bird, one dollar and sixty-five cents, into the strikers' treasury.

At first strike pay was handed out every Friday from out of the funds of the United Garment Workers. But on Friday, November 11, the number of applicants for strike pay was far beyond what it was possible to handle in the cramped office quarters. Through some misunderstanding, which has to this day never been explained, the crowd, many thousands of men, women and children, were denied admittance to the large wheat pit of the Open Board of Trade, which, it was understood, had been reserved for their use. It was a heart-rending sight, as from early morning till late afternoon they waited in the halls and corridors and outside in the streets. At first in dumb patience and afterwards in bewilderment, but all along with unexampled gentleness and quietness.

At this point, Mr. John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, took hold of a situation already difficult, and which might soon have become dangerous. He explained to the crowd that everyone would be attended to in their various district halls, and that all vouchers already out would be redeemed. This relieved the tension, but the Joint Strike Committee were driven to take over at once the question of relief, so that none should be reduced to accept that hunger bargain, which, as Mrs. Robins put it, meant the surrender of civilization.

With such an immense number of strike-bound families to support, the utmost economy of resources was necessary, and it was resolved hereafter to give out as little cash as possible, but to follow the example of the United Mine Workers and others and open commissary stations. This plan was carried out, and more than any other one plan, saved the day. Benefits were handed over, in the form of groceries on a fixed ration scale. As far as we know, such a plan had never before been adapted to the needs of women and children, nor carried out by organized labor for the benefit of a large unorganized group. Of the economy of the system there is no question, seeing that a well-organized committee can always purchase supplies in quantities at wholesale price, sometimes at cost price, and frequently can, as was done in this instance, draw upon the good feeling of merchants and dealers, and receive large contributions of bread, flour, coal and other commodities. Commissary stations were established in different localities. Here is a sample ration as furnished at one of the stores, although, thanks to the kindness of friends, the allowance actually supplied was of a much more varied character:

Bread 18 loaves Coffee 1 lb. Sugar 5 lbs. Beans 5 lbs. Oatmeal 2 pkgs. (large) Ham 10 lbs.

For Italians, oatmeal was replaced by spaghetti, and Kosher food for those of the orthodox Jewish faith was arranged for through orders upon local grocery stores and kosher butchers in the Jewish quarter. The tickets entitling to supplies were issued through the shop chairman at the local halls to those strikers known to be in greatest need.

The commissary plan, however, still left untouched such matters as rent, fuel, gas, and likewise the necessities of the single young men and girls. Also the little babies and the nursing mothers, who needed fresh milk, had to be thought of and provided for. There were certain strictly brought up, self-respecting little foreign girls who explained with tears that they could not take an order on a restaurant where there were strange people about, because "it would not be decent," a terrible criticism on so many of our public eating places. So a small separate fund was collected which gave two dollars a week per head, to tide over the time of trouble for some of these sorely pressed ones. There was a committee on milk for babies, and another on rent, and the League handled the question of coal.

With these necessities provided for, the strikers settled down to a test of slow endurance. Picketing went on as before, and although arrests were numerous, and fines followed in the train of arrests, the police and the court situation was at no time so acute as it had been in either New York or Philadelphia.

The heroism shown by many of the strikers and their families it would be hard to overestimate. Small inconveniences were made light of. Families on strike themselves, or the friends of strikers would crush into yet tighter quarters so that a couple of boys or two or three girls out of work might crowd into the vacated room, and so have a shelter over their heads "till the strike was over." A League member found her way one bitter afternoon in December to one home where lay an Italian woman in bed with a new-born baby and three other children, aged three, four and five years respectively, surrounding her. There was neither food nor fuel in the house. On the bed were three letters from the husband's employer, offering to raise his old pay from fifteen to thirty dollars per week, if he would go back to work and so help to break the strike. The wife spoke with pride of the husband's refusal to be a traitor. "It is not only bread we give the children. We live not by bread alone. We live by freedom, and I will fight for it though I die to give it to my children." And this woman's baby was one of 1,250 babies born into strikers' homes that winter.

To me those long months were like nothing so much as like living in a besieged city. There was the same planning for the obtaining of food, and making it last as long as possible, the same pinched, wan faces, the same hunger illnesses, the same laying of little ones into baby graves. And again, besides the home problems, there was the same difficulty of getting at the real news, knowing the meaning of what was going on, the same heart-wearing alternations of hope and dread.

Through it all, moreover, persisted the sense that this was something more than an industrial rising, although it was mainly so. It was likewise the uprising of a foreign people, oppressed and despised. It was the tragedy of the immigrant, his high hopes of liberty and prosperity in the new land blighted, finding himself in America, but not of America.

By the end of November the manufacturers were beginning to tire of watching their idle machinery, and the tale of unfilled orders grew monotonous. There began to be grumbles from the public against the disastrous effects upon business of the long-continued struggle. Alderman Merriam succeeded in having the City Council bring about a conference of the parties to the strike "to the end that a just and lasting settlement of the points in controversy may be made."

Messrs Hart, Schaffner and Marx, a firm employing in forty-eight shops between eight and nine thousand workers, agreed to meet with the committee and the labor leaders. After long hours of conferring a tentative agreement was at length arrived at, signed by the representatives of all parties, approved by the Chicago Federation of Labor, and, when referred to the army of strikers for their confirmation, was by them rejected. Indeed the great majority refused even to vote upon it at all. This was indeed a body blow to the hopes of peace. For the unfavorable attitude of the strikers there were, however, several reasons. The agreement, such as it was, did not affect quite a fourth of the whole number of workers who were out, and a regular stampede back to work of the rest, with no guarantee at all, was greatly to be dreaded. Again, a clause discriminating against all who it should be decided had been guilty of violence during the strike, gave deep offense. It was felt to be adding insult to injury, to allude to violence during a struggle conducted so quietly and with such dignity and self-restraint. But a further explanation lay in the attitude of mind of the strikers themselves. The idea of compromise was new to them, and the acceptance of any compromise was a way out of the difficulty, that was not for one moment to be considered. Thus it came about that a settlement that many an old experienced organization would have accepted was ruled quite out of court by these new and ardent converts to trade unionism, who were prepared to go on, facing destitution, rather than yield a jot of what seemed to them an essential principle.

Organized labor, indeed, realized fully the seriousness of the situation. The leaders had used their utmost influence to have the agreement accepted, and their advice had been set aside.

What view, then, was taken of this development of these central bodies and by the affiliated trades of the city, who were all taxing themselves severely both in time and money for the support of the strike?

The democracy of labor was on this occasion indeed justified of its children, and the supreme right of the strikers to make the final decision on their own affairs and abide by the consequences was maintained. Plans were laid for continuing the commissary stores, and just at this stage there was received from the United Garment Workers the sum of $4,000 for the support of the stores. The strikers were also encouraged to hold out when on January 9 the firm of Sturm-Mayer signed up and took back about five hundred workers. Also, a committee of the state Senate began an inquiry into the strike, thus further educating the public into an understanding of the causes lying back of all the discontent, and accounting for much of the determination not to give in.

All the same, the prospects seemed very dark, and the strikers and their leaders had settled down to a steady, dogged resistance. It was like nothing in the world so much as holding a besieged city, and the outcome was as uncertain, and depended upon the possibility of obtaining for the beleaguered ones supplies of the primitive necessaries of life, food and fuel. And the fort was held until about the middle of January came the news that Hart, Schaffner and Marx had opened up negotiations, and presently an agreement was signed, and their thousands of employes were back at work.

They were back at work under an agreement, which, while it did not, strictly speaking, recognize the union, did not discriminate against members of the union. Nay, as the workers had to have representation and representatives, it was soon found that in practice it was only through their organization that the workers could express themselves at all.

This is not the place in which to enlarge upon the remarkable success which has attended the working out of this memorable agreement. It is enough to say that ever since all dealings between the firm and their employes have been conducted upon the principle of collective bargaining.

The agreement with Messrs. Hart, Schaffner and Marx was signed on January 14, 1911, and the Joint Conference Board then bent all its efforts towards some settlement with houses of the Wholesale Clothiers' Association and the National Tailors' Association for the twenty or thirty thousand strikers still out.

Suddenly, without any warning the strike was terminated. How and why it has never been explained, even to those most interested in its support. All that is known is that on February 3 the strike was called off at a meeting of the Strikers' Executive Committee, at which Mr. T.A. Rickert, president of the United Garment Workers of America, and his organizers, were present. This was done, without consulting the Joint Conference Board, which for fourteen weeks had had charge of the strike, and which was composed of representatives from the United Garment Workers of America, the Garment Workers' local District Council, the strikers' own Executive Committee, the Chicago Federation of Labor, and the Women's Trade Union League.

This meant the close of the struggle. Three out of the four commissary stations were closed the following day, and the fourth a week later.

As regards the great mass of strikers then left, it was but a hunger bargain. They had to return to work without any guarantee for fair treatment, without any agency through which grievances could be dealt with, or even brought before the employers. And hundreds of the workers had not even the poor comfort that they could go back. Business was disorganized, work was slack, and the Association houses would not even try to make room for their rebellious employes. The refusal of work would be made more bitter by the manner of its refusal. Several were met with the gibe, "You're a good speaker, go down to your halls, they want you there." One employer actually invited a returned striker into his private office, shook hands with him as if in welcome, and then told him it was his last visit, he might go!

The beginning of the present stage of the industrial rebellion among working-women in the United States may be said to have been made with the immense garment-workers' strikes. All have been strikes of the unorganized, the common theory that strikes must have their origin in the mischief-breeding activities of the walking delegate finding no confirmation here. They were strikes of people who knew not what a union was, making protest in the only way known to them against intolerable conditions, and the strikers were mostly very young women. One most significant fact was that they had the support of a national body of trade-union women, banded together in a federation, working on the one hand with organized labor, and on the other bringing in as helpers large groups of outside women. Such measure of success as came to the strikers, and the indirect strengthening of the woman's cause, which has since borne such fruit, was in great part due to the splendid reinforcement of organized labor, through the efforts of this league of women's unions.

I need touch but lightly on the strikes in other branches of the sewing trades, where the history of the uprising was very similar.

In July, 1910, 70,000 cloak-makers of New York were out on strike for nine weeks asking shorter hours, increase of wages; and sanitary conditions in their workshops. All these and some minor demands were in the end granted by the Manufacturers' Association, who controlled the trade, but the settlement nearly went to pieces on the rock of union recognition. An arrangement was eventually arrived at, on the suggestion of Mr. Louis Brandeis, that the principle of preference to unionists, first enforced in Australia, should be embodied in the agreement. Under this plan, union standards as to hours of labor, rates of wages and working conditions prevail, and, when hiring help, union men of the necessary qualifications and degree of skill must have precedence over non-union men. With the signing of the agreement the strike ended.

January, 1913, saw another group of garment-workers on strike in New York. This time there were included men and women in the men's garment trades, also the white-goods-workers, the wrapper and kimono-makers, and the ladies' waist-and dress-makers. There is no means of knowing how many workers were out at any one time, but the number was estimated at over 100,000. The white-goods-workers embraced the very youngest girls, raw immigrants from Italy and Russia, whom the manufacturers set to work as soon as they were able to put plain seams through the machine, and this was all the skill they ever attained. These children from their extreme youth and inexperience were peculiarly exposed to danger from the approaches of cadets of the underworld, and an appeal went out for a large number of women to patrol the streets, and see that the girls at least had the protection of their presence.

The employers belonging to the Dress and Waist Manufacturers' Association made terms with their people, after a struggle, under an agreement very similar to that described above in connection with the cloak-makers.

One of the most satisfactory results of the strikes among the garment-workers has been the standardizing of the trade wherever an agreement has been procured and steadily adhered to. It is not only that hours are shorter and wages improved, and the health and safety of the worker guarded, and work spread more evenly over the entire year, but the harassing dread of the cut without notice, and of wholesale, uncalled-for dismissals is removed. Thus is an element of certainty and a sense of method and order introduced. Above all, home-work is abolished.

In an unstandardized trade there can be no certainty as to wages and hours, while there is a constant tendency to level down under the pressure of unchecked competition from both above and below. There is too frequent breaking of factory laws and ignoring of the city's fire and health ordinances, because the unorganized workers dare not, on peril of losing their jobs, insist that laws and ordinances were made to be kept and not broken. Also, in any trade where a profit can be made by giving out work, as in the sewing trades, we find, unless this is prevented by organization or legislation, an enormous amount of home-work, ill-paid and injurious to all, cutting down the wages of the factory hands, and involving the wholesale exploitation of children.

Home-work the unions will have none of, and therefore, wherever the collective bargain has been struck and kept, there we find the giving out of work from the factory absolutely forbidden, the home guarded from the entrance of the contractor, motherhood respected, babyhood defended from the outrage of child labor, and a higher standard of living secured for the family by the higher and securer earnings of the normal breadwinners.

Everywhere on the continent the results of these strikes have been felt, women's strikes as they have been for the most part. The trade unionists of this generation have been encouraged in realizing how much fight there was in these young girls. All labor has been inspired. In trade after trade unorganized workers have learned the meaning of the words "the solidarity of labor," and it has become to them an article of faith. Whether it has been button-workers in Muscatine, or corset-workers in Kalamazoo, shoe-workers in St. Louis, or textile-workers in Lawrence, whether the struggle has been crowned with success or crushed into the dust of failure, the workers have been heartened to fight the more bravely because of the thrilling example set them by the garment-workers, and have thus brought the day of deliverance for all a little nearer hand.

Again, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the public has been taught many lessons. The immense newspaper publicity, which could never have been obtained except for a struggle on a stupendous scale, has proved a campaign of education for young and old, for business man and farmer, for lawyer and politician, for housewife and for student. It has left the manufacturer less cocksure of the soundness of his individualist philosophy. More often is he found explaining and even apologizing for industrial conditions, which of yore he would have ignored as non-existent. He can no longer claim from the public his aforetime undisputed privilege of running his own business as he pleases, without concern for either the wishes or the welfare of employes and community.

The results are also seen in the fact that it is now so much easier to get the workers' story across the footlights in smaller local struggles, such as those of the porcelain-workers in Trenton and! the waitresses in Chicago; in the increasing success in putting through legislation for the limitation of hours and the regulation of wages for the poorest paid in state after state. By state or by nation one body after another is set the task of doing something towards accounting for the unceasing industrial unrest, towards solving the general industrial problem. Even if to some of us the remedial plans outlined seem to fall far short of the mark, they still are a beginning and are a foretaste of better things ahead.

The conferences and discussions on unemployment are an admission, however belated, that a society which has, in the interests of the privileged classes, permitted the exploitation of the worker, must face the consequences, bear some of the burden, and do its share towards preventing the continuance of the evil. We do not cure smallpox by punishing the patient, nor do we thus prevent its recurrence among others. We handle the disease both by treating the sick person himself, and by finding the causes that lead to its spread, and arresting these. Industrial eruptive diseases have to be dealt with in like fashion, the cause sought for, and the social remedy applied fearlessly.



V

THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION

The melting-pot of the races is also the melting-pot of nationalities. The drama that we are witnessing in America is a drama on a more tremendous scale than can ever have been staged in the world before.

By the unawakened and so-called pure American the incoming Italian or Jew is regarded as an outsider, who may be graciously permitted to hew wood and draw water, to forge steel in a rolling-mill or to sew in a factory, to cut ice or make roads for the rest of us, and who may, on the other hand, be given the cold shoulder more or less politely, generally less, when it comes to acquaintanceship, to the simple democratic social intercourse which we share with those whom we admit as our equals.

I, too, am an immigrant, although an English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon immigrant. Therefore I am accepted among Americans as one of themselves. But there comes to me often a bitter sense of separation from my fellow-immigrants, a separation by not one wall, but many. First, the wall we none of us can help, the wall raised by difference of language. Next, the wall raised by different manners and customs. This we might try to scale oftener than we do. Again, there are separating walls, harder than these either to surmount or to lay low, walls of provincial arrogance and crass self-satisfaction, and the racial pride that is mostly another name for primitive ignorance.

An ordinary city-dwelling American or an English-speaking foreigner earning a living in business or in one of the professions or even in some of the skilled trades might live a lifetime in the United States and never meet non-Americanized foreigners socially at all. In church or club or on the footing of private entertainment these first-comers and their friends keep themselves to themselves. And although among us such race-defined limits are less hard and fast than, say, the lines of class in old European countries, still there they are. The less enlightened do not even think about the immigrant within our shores at all. Those somewhat more advanced will talk glibly about the Americanization of the foreigner that is going on all the time. So is it. That is true, but the point here to be noted is that the desirable and inevitable process of the Americanization of the foreigner, and his assimilation by and into the American nation takes place outside the charmed circles wherein these good respectable folks dwell; takes place in spite of their indifference; takes place without their active assistance, without their cooeperation, save and except so far as that cooeperation is unconscious and unavoidable.

The Americanizing process takes place in the street, in the cars, in the stores, in the workshop, at the theater, and the nickel show, in the wheatfield and on the icefield; best and quickest of all in the school, and nowhere so consciously as in the trade union, for all that section of foreigners whom organized labor has been able to reach and draw into its fold. Carried out for the most part in crude and haphazard fashion the process goes on, only in the vast majority of cases it is far slower than it need be.

Too many are but little touched, or touched only in painful ways by the Americanizing process, especially the married women who stay in their homes. Their lot is so often a tragedy. They have lost their own country and yet have not gained another. Even this is not the worst. The younger folks are in some fashion made over into American men and women. And here comes in the crucial question which concerns something more than universality of opportunity, quality of opportunity. These little Poles and Ruthenians and Bohemians are finally made over into Americans. Their life-contribution will be given to the generation now growing up, of which they will form a part. We want that contribution to be as fine as possible. They cannot give more than they themselves are. And what they are to be in very large part we are making them. Will they not be all the finer citizens-to-be if we come closer to them and to their parents in the warm friendly social relations of life?

The plane of social intercourse is the last to be transformed by democracy. Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations hamper us the longest. Here we are still far behind the fine, free and admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street and the marketplace. Here between strangers is the closest physical nearness. Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served, of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means of transportation. And that basic democracy of the street and the marketplace is all between strangers.

It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation for the harmony to be.

Upon careful consideration it would appear that the immigrant problem is only a slightly varied expression of the general social and economic problem. It focuses public attention because the case of the immigrant is so extreme. For instance, whatever conditions, industrial or civic, press hardly upon the American worker, these conditions press with yet greater hardship upon the alien. The alien and his difficulties form therefore a first point of contact, the point where the social reformer begins with his suggestions for improvement. The very same thought unconsciously forms the basis of many of the proposed methods of dealing with the immigrant, however startlingly these may differ from one another in expression. On the one hand we have such suggestions as that of Mr. Paul Kellogg, which he called "A Labor Tariff, A Minimum Wage for the Immigrant." It does not take very acute reasoning to perceive that if such a proposal were ever to become law, it would not be very long before there would have to be a universal minimum wage for everyone.

On the other hand, Mr. Edward B. Whitney in his Memorandum appended to the Report of the Commission of the State of New York argues thus in discussing the claim made by the majority of the Commission that certain special help and protection is needed by the alien. He asks "whether, if a further extension of this kind of state charity is to be made, it would not be better to take up something for the benefit of our own citizens or for the benefit of citizen and alien alike." Mr. Whitney is entirely logical. Only progress rarely takes place for logical reasons, or on lines dictated by logic, but it does in almost all cases follow the line of least resistance, and the wise progressive accepts gratefully whatever he can get, without being too anxious as to whether it seems to be logically the next step or not.

The immigrant has hitherto been used as an excuse to permit the dehumanizing of our cities; he has been used industrially as an instrument to make life harder for the hardly pressed classes of workers whom he joined on his arrival here. That such has been his sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The most that we know of health has been learned through a study of the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.

In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children when grown but a little older.

We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time, benefited all workers.

It is easy to see that the great strikes in the sewing and textile trades of the last few years have proved a searchlight especially into women's industrial conditions, educating the whole public by informing them of the terrible price paid for our comfort by the makers of the commonest articles of household purchase and use, the sacrifice of youth, health, happiness, and life itself demanded by any industry which exacts of the employes cruelly long hours of work at an exhausting speed, and which for such overwork pays them wretchedly.

These uprisings have besides stimulated to an encouraging degree the forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story, illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can be in relation to immigrant problems.

"Not long ago," she says, "I listened to a paper by a sanitary engineer, on the relation between the immigrant and public health. It was based on a study of typhoid fever in a certain city in the United States. He showed that most typhoid epidemics started among our foreign colonies, and spread to other sections. This, he explained, is because the foreigner has been accustomed to a pure water supply, and is therefore much more susceptible to typhoid than the American who has struggled since birth against the diseases which come from polluted water.

"Instead, then, of urging this as an additional reason for giving us all decent water, he drew the remarkable conclusion that in the interests of the public health, some new basis for the exclusion of immigrants must be adopted. In this way," Miss Abbott adds, "most discussions on the immigrant are diverted, and leave the fundamental problems quite untouched. For whether we adopt a literary and physique test, increase the head-tax, and do all the other things suggested by the restrictionists, thousands of immigrants will continue to come to us every year."

Apart from general considerations, these gigantic industrial upheavals have afforded to the public-spirited citizen an unsurpassed opportunity of understanding and appreciating the industrial problem as it affects and is affected by the immigrant girl and young woman. A few of us, here and there, from personal and trade experience knew the facts years ago as well as they are generally known today. But not all the Government reports, not an army of investigators could have imparted this knowledge to the public, and impressed upon them the sordid suffering of the working and living conditions of the foreign woman in the sewing trades in any great American city.

For in strikes of such magnitude, where whole groups of the participators themselves lived for months in a white heat of idealism and enthusiasm, life-stories are no longer dragged out of shy retiring girls, but are poured out in a burning flood by those very same girls, now quite transformed by the revolution through which they have passed, and by the new ideas of liberty and sisterhood with which they are possessed.

I speak of the woman worker here, because it is she who is my concern at present, and in all the now historic strikes she has played a very large part. Indeed in the first of these risings, in the shirtwaist strikes of 1909-1910 in New York and Philadelphia, very few men workers were involved, and in the huge Chicago strike, 1910-1911, among the makers of men's ready-made clothing, although there the girl strikers numbered only about one-fourth of the whole, even that fourth made up the very respectable total of, it is believed, somewhere around 10,000 individuals, the population of a small city. Indeed it would give most Americans pause to be told that in this same Chicago strike the whole of the workers, men and women together, numbered more than the troops that Washington was able to place in the field at any one time during the War of Independence.

Most of these strikes have been strikes of unorganized workers, who did not know even of the existence of a union till after they had gone out, and therefore with no idea of appealing to an organization for even moral support. In Chicago the strikers belonged to nine different nationalities, speaking as many different languages, so it is clear that the pressure must have been indeed irresistible that forced so many thousands with apparently no common meeting-ground or even common means of communication out of the shops into the street. When the organized strike, they know why. When the unorganized of one nationality and one tongue strike, they can tell one another why. Yet these people struck in spots all over the city almost simultaneously, although in most cases without any knowledge by one group that other groups were also resisting oppression and making a last stand against any further degradation of their poor standards of living. Amid every variety of shop grievance, and with the widest possible difference in race, language and customs, they shared two disadvantageous conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers and sisters. To him they could be one group, for their interests were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one another by the accidents of birth and speech.

So the searchlight turned on then on the sewing trades has since cast its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of living.

All tests of admission to secure some measure of selection among new arrivals are but experiments in an untried field. We have no tests but rough-and-ready ones, and even these are often inconsistent with one another. For instance, for a good many years now the immigration inspectors have taken such precautions as they could against the admission of the insane, but it is only recently that modified Binet tests have been used to check the entry of a socially far more injurious class, the congenitally feebleminded.

Those who have worked extensively among newly arrived foreign girls find that they arrive here with, as a rule, much less idea of what awaits them, what will be expected of them, and the difficulties and even dangers they may encounter, than the men. When the Chicago Women's Trade Union League began its immigration department a few years ago, it was found that three dollars was about the average sum which a girl had in her pocket when she reached the city of her destination. Ten dollars was felt to be a fortune, while I have since heard of young girls landing alone in a great city, and without a single cent with which to leave the depot. It is often said, why do their mothers let them go away (sixteen and eighteen are common ages) so young, so inexperienced? It must be remembered that many of the Polish and Lithuanian girls, for example, come from small villages. The mothers themselves have never seen a big city, and have not the remotest conception of any place of more than five hundred inhabitants, where the distances are short, and where everyone knows everyone else. They have no idea of the value of money, when it comes to earning and spending it in America. Three dollars a week is to mother, as to daughter, an ample sum for the young traveler.

It often happens that many of the young immigrants have had letters from those who had preceded them. But we know what human nature is. The person who succeeds proudly writes home the good news. The still more successful person is able to take a trip home and display the visible signs of his or her wealth. The unsuccessful, as a rule, either does not write at all, or writing, does not admit the humiliating truth.

In the ignorance and inexperience of the young foreign girl the white slaver finds his easiest prey, and the betrayer is too often the man speaking her own tongue. On this terrible subject the nation, like other nations, is beginning to wake up to its responsibilities in relation to the immigrant girl as in relation to other girls. This special danger to young womanhood is so linked with other social questions that I merely allude to it here, because of the certainty I entertain that much even of this danger would lessen if the trade-union movement among women were so strong and so extensive that any woman, young or old, could travel from place to place as a member of a truly world-wide organization. Then she would have a better chance of arriving well posted as to ways of earning her living, and of finding friends in every city and every town and village.

It may be urged that there exist already organizations world-wide in their scope, such as the religious associations, for the very purpose of safeguarding wandering girlhood. There are, and they accomplish a notable amount of good. But their appeal is not universal; they never have money or workers enough to cope adequately with a task like this, and they are not built upon the sound economic basis of the trade union.

The immigrant problem was not encountered by the first factory workers here, who were American-born. So we find the earliest leaders in the trade organization of women were wholly drawn from the daughters of the native settlers. They felt and spoke always as free-women, "the daughters of freemen." When this class of girls withdrew from the factories, they gave place to the Irish immigrant, in some respects a less advanced type than themselves. I have briefly traced some of the economic reasons which affected the rise, growth and eventual passing away of the various phases of trade unionism among women in this country. The progress of these was radically modified by the influx into the trades of workers from one nation after another; by the passing from a trade or a group of trades of body after body of the old workers, starved out or giving way before the recent arrivals, whose pitiful power to seize the jobs of the others and earn some sort of a living, has lain in their very weakness and helplessness.

So the first Irish girls who came into the factory life of New England were peasants, with no knowledge of city life, but quick and ready to learn. They went into the new occupations, and picked up the new ways of doing things. And by the time they had grasped the meaning of this strange industrial world in which they found themselves, they were in the relentless grasp of machine-controlled industry. Under untold handicaps they had to begin at the very beginning, and start rebellions on their own account. From the sixties on we can detect the preponderance of Irish names in the annals of early trade unionism. When they had adapted themselves to their conditions, for they quickly became Americanized, they showed in the trade unions which they organized the remarkable qualities for political leadership which the Irish and Irish-Americans have ever since displayed in this country. The important role which Irish and Irish-American men have played in the councils of American trade unionism is well known, and their power today remains very great. So as regards the women, by glancing over the past we can readily trace the influence of the Irish girl, in the efforts after organization, unsuccessful as these often were. It was Maggie McNamara who led the Brooklyn Female Burnishers' Association in 1868. It was during the sixties that Kate Mullaney was leading her splendid body of Troy laundresses, and twenty years later we find Leonora Barry, another Irish girl, as the leading spirit among the women of the Knights of Labor.

Except in isolated instances, no other race has come to the front among working-women until recently. We read of German women and Bohemian women as faithful unionists. But Germans, Bohemians and Scandinavians advanced or lost ground along with the others. By this time, moreover, the nation had become more habituated to absorbing immigrants from various nations, and the distinction between races was less accentuated after a few years' residence. On the part of the Germans and Scandinavians, amalgamation has been so speedy, and in the end so complete, that most of those who have been here some time, and invariably the children of the first-comers, are Americans through and through.

With the foreign peoples that we have with us today, the situation is somewhat different. Certain general principles are common to the course of all these migrations. They originate, on the one hand, in economic pressure, complicated not unfrequently with religious wars or persecutions, and on the other, in the expectation of better times in a new country. They meet the demands of a new country, asking for labor, and are further subject to the inducements of agents. Under our haphazard social arrangements, the newly arrived often meet wretched conditions, and have no means of knowing how they are being used to lower yet further wages for themselves and others.

Always, whatever their own descent and history, the older inhabitants feel resentment, knowing no more than their unfortunate rivals what is the underlying reason of the trouble. Milder forms of antagonism consist in sending the immigrant workers "to Coventry," using contemptuous language of or to them, as we hear every day in "dago" or "sheeny," and in objections by the elders to the young people associating together, while the shameful use that is continually made of the immigrants as strike-breakers may rouse such mutual indignation that there are riots and pitched battles as a consequence.

The first indignant efforts to exclude the intruders are vain. More and more do experienced trade unionists admit this, and plead for the acceptance of the inevitable, and turn all their energies towards the organization of the unwelcome rivals. Scabs they must be, if left alone. Better take them in where they can be influenced and controlled, and can therefore do less damage. Here is where the help of the foreign organizer is so essential to overcome the indifference and quell the misgivings of the strangers in a situation where the influence of the employer is almost always adverse.

At length the immigrant gains a footing; he is left in possession, either wholly or partly, and amalgamation to a great degree takes place. A generation grows up that knew not the sad rivalry of their fathers, for fresh industrial rivalries on different grounds have replaced the old, as sharply cut, but not on race lines.

Every one of these stages can be seen today in all the industrial centers and in many rural ones, with one people or another.

While the tendency of the organized labor movement, both in the United States and in Canada, is towards restriction, whether exercised directly through immigration laws, or indirectly through laws against the importation of contract labor, there exist wide differences of opinion among trade unionists, and in the younger groups are many who recognize that there are limits beyond which no legislation can affect the issue, and that even more important than the conditions of admission to this new world is the treatment which the worker receives after he passes the entrance gate. If it is necessary in the interests of those already in this country to guard the portals carefully, it is equally necessary for the welfare of all, that the community through their legislators, both state and national, should accept the responsibility of preventing the ruthless exploitation of immigrants in the interest of private profit. Exploited and injured themselves, these become the unconscious instruments of hardly less ruthless exploitation and injury to their fellows in the competitive struggle for a bare subsistence.

Such exploitation could be in some degree checked through the authorities assuming control, and especially by furnishing to the new arrivals abundant information and advice, acquainting them with the state of the labor market in different localities and at different times. It is for the authorities also to see that the transportation of newly arrived foreigners from place to place is rendered secure; to encourage their early instruction in the language and laws of the country and the ordinances of the city, along with enlightenment as to the resources in time of trouble, which lie open to the poorest, if they but know where to turn.

In the first number of the Immigrants in America Review, the editor, Frances A. Kellor, points out what an unusual opportunity has been granted to America to formulate a definite program with reference to alien residents. Now is the time, she insists, to perfect laws, establish systems and improve conditions, when, owing to the European War, but few immigrants are arriving, and therefore, when no great rush of people demand expedients. "Now is the time to build, to repair, to initiate, so we may obviate the necessity for expedients."

The writer shows that efforts ought to be directed along seven lines, and the work on these seven lines should be closely cooerdinated.

1. Transportation. The safe transportation of admitted aliens to their destination.

2. Employment. Security of employment, and adequate cooerdinated, regulated labor-market organization.

3. Standards of living. Making it possible for the immigrant to adopt and maintain better standards of living, by removal of discriminations in localities, housing and sanitation, and by preventing overcrowding.

4. Savings. Information regarding savings banks, loan funds, agricultural colonies, and legislation regarding the same.

5. Education. Reduction of illiteracy, the teaching of civics, and extension of opportunity of education and industrial training.

6. Citizenship. Higher and simpler naturalization requirements, and processes, and placing the legal status of the alien upon a just and consistent foundation.

7. Public Charges. National and state cooeperation in the care of any who may become public charges.

No one can suppose that every Greek boy desires to become a shoeblack, or that every Scandinavian girl is fitted for domestic service and for nothing else; that every Slavic Jewess should become a garment-worker; that every Italian man should work on the roads; that the Lithuanian and Hungarian, no matter what their training or their ability, should be compelled to go into the steel-rolling mills. All this because they land speaking no English, and not knowing how to place themselves in occupations better adapted to their inclinations and qualifications. No one knows how many educated and trained men and women are thus turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the ruin of their own lives and the loss of the community.

The unregulated private employment office, the padrone and the sweat-shop are the agencies who direct the newcomers to jobs, whether it be in the city or out in the country camp.

Many of the new arrivals would gladly take up agriculture, if they knew where to go, and were safeguarded against imposition—having a fee taken, for instance, and then landed several hundred miles away, penniless, to find all the jobs gone.

The immigrant on landing is very much like the child leaving school to go to work, and requires vocational guidance just as sorely.

The needs of the alien are closely related to the general question of unemployment. He suffers in an acute degree from the want of system in the regularization of industry, and the fact that we have failed to recognize unemployment, and all irregularity of employment as a condition to be met and provided against by industry and the community.

Americans take credit to themselves that so many immigrants do well, succeed, become prosperous citizens and members of society, but wish to shoulder none of the blame when the alien falls down by the way, or lives under such home conditions that his babies die, and his older children fall out of their grades, drift into the street trades or find their way into the juvenile court. Americans forget how many of all these evil results are due to the want of social machinery to enable the alien to fit into his new surroundings, or the neglect to set such social machinery agoing where it already exists. In the small towns it is not unusual for health ordinances to be strictly enforced in the English-speaking localities, and allowed to remain a dead letter in the immigrant districts. In Chicago it was in the stockyards district that garbage was dumped for many years; garbage, the product of other wards, that the residents of those other wards insisted be removed from their back-doors. How much of the high infant death-rate among stockyards families has been due to the garbage exposed and decaying, so carefully brought there, from the fine residential districts?

Legally the alien suffers under a burden of disabilities of which he is usually wholly unaware, until he has broken some law or regulation devised, it would appear, often for his discomfiture, rather than for anyone's else benefit. These laws and regulations, in themselves sometimes just and sometimes unjust, make up a mass of the most inconsistent legislation. State laws, varying from state to state, and city ordinances equally individual limit the employment of aliens on public work. Peddlers' and fishers' licenses come under similar restrictions; so with the owning of property, the right to leave property by will, say, to a wife and children in Europe, and the right even to protection of life, in violation of treaty rights. "The state courts have never punished a single outrage of this kind" [violence at the hands of a mob]. The federal government, Miss Kellor states, makes a payment to a victim's heirs out of a secret service fund "if the ambassador is persistent, and threatens to withdraw from Washington if the murder of his countrymen is not to be punished."

These are all most serious handicaps, and certainly the need for investigation of all laws, the codifying of many, and the abolition of some is urgent.

If some of these handicaps were lifted from the immigrant, complaint against under-cutting competition of cheap foreign labor would largely cease, and the task of organizers among the foreign workers would be much simplified, even while we are waiting for the day when it will be possible for all to obtain work without turning others out of their jobs, which can only come about when we produce intelligently for the use of all, instead of for the profit of the exceptional few.

Here and there work on the lines sketched out is beginning, even though much of it is as yet unrelated to the rest. The community is making headway, in the acknowledgment by various states, headed by New York, of the just claim of the immigrant, once he is admitted within our borders, to the protection of the government. For long after the Federal authorities took over the control of immigration, their concern was limited to some degree of restriction over the entry of foreigners, and the enforcement of deportation, when such was considered necessary. Quite a fresh departure, however, was made in the year 1910, when the state of New York, following the recommendations of its State Commission on Immigration (1909), established its Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which really grew out of the activities of a private society. Other communities are also realizing their responsibility. California established a permanent Commission on Immigration and Housing in 1913, and the Investigating Commissions of Massachusetts and New Jersey recommended similar agencies in their reports to the legislatures in 1914.

New York has already accomplished excellent results, and more important still, has shown the direction, in which other states may both follow and cooeperate. A few years more may see us with interstate legislation insuring the better care and protection of immigrants all over the country, interstate legislation being the curiously indirect method which the United States has hit upon to overcome the imperfections and deficiencies of its national instrument of government. One of these days may even find the Federal House at Washington taking over, in other lines besides that of foreign workers, the functions outlined for it in the first instance by the daughter states.

The United States Government has recently entered a new field in the passage of a law, authorizing the protection of immigrants in transit to their destination, and providing for the establishment of a station in Chicago, where the immigrants will go on their arrival, and will thus be protected from the gross frauds from which they have so long suffered. The present administration also promises an experiment in the development of the Bureau of Information in the Immigration Department.

It is not so easy for any of us to give the same dispassionate consideration to the problem that is with us as to that which has long been settled, and has passed away into the calm atmosphere of history. And truly, there are complications in the present situation which our fathers had not to face. And first, the much greater dissimilarity in training, mental outlook, social customs, and in the case of the men and women from eastern Europe, not to speak of Asia, the utter unlikeness in language, makes mutual knowledge and understanding much more difficult, and the growth of mutual confidence, therefore, much slower.

No one has yet analyzed the effects upon the nervous system of the migrating worker, of the unsettlement of habits, and the change of surroundings and social environment, working in connection with the changed climatic conditions, and the often total change in food. This is one phase of the immigrant problem which deserves the most careful study. And when, as too often in the case of the Russian Jew, this complete alteration of life is piled on top of the persecutions so many of them have endured, and the shocks so many have sustained before leaving their native land, the normal, usual effects of the transition are emphasized and exaggerated, and it may take a generation or longer before complete Americanization and amalgamation is brought about.

The longer such a change is in being consummated, the more is the new generation likely to retain some of their most characteristic qualities permanently; to retain and therefore to impress these upon the dominant race, in this case upon the American nation, through association, and finally, through marriage. Especially is this a probable result where we find such vitality and such intensely prepotent power as among the Jews.

In reference to trade-union organization among women, while each nationality presents its own inherent problem, there is equally no doubt but that each will in the future make its own special contribution towards the progress and increased scope of the movement among the women workers.

As matters are developing today, the fulfillment of this promise of the future has already begun most markedly among the Slavic Jewesses, especially those from Russia. These young women have already brought, and are every day bringing into the dreary sweatshop and the speeded-up factory a spirit of fearlessness and independence both in thought and action, which is having an amazing effect upon the conditions of factory industry in the trades where they work. So also, supporting and supported by the men of their own race, these Russian Jewish girls, many of them extremely young, are inspiring their fellow-workers and interpenetrating the somewhat matter-of-fact atmosphere of American trade unionism with their own militant determination and enthusiasm. With most, the strike has been their initiation into trade unionism, often the general strike in their own trade, the strike on a scale hitherto unparalleled in trades where either the whole or a very considerable proportion of the workers are women. Some again, especially among the leaders, approach unionism through the ever open door of socialism. If I speak here of the women of the Slavic Jewish race, it is not that I wish to ignore the men. I have to leave them on one side, that is all.

These girls add to courage and enthusiasm, such remarkable gifts of intellect and powers of expression as to make them a power wherever they have become awakened to the new problems that face them here and now, and to their own responsibilities in relation thereto. They are essentially individualists. They do not readily or naturally either lean upon others or cooeperate with others, nor yet confide in others. They come here with a history generations long of ill-treatment and persecution. Many thousands of them have witnessed their dearest tortured, outraged and killed with the narrowest possible escape from some similar fate themselves. To most any return to their native country is completely barred, and they do not therefore nurse the hope, so inveterately cherished by the Italians, for instance, that they may some day be able to go back.

When the Russian Jewish girl first hears of a trade union, she has usually been some years in one of our cities, working in a factory or a sweatshop, let us say as a garment-worker. The religious and social liberty which she has here learnt to consider her due has stimulated her desire for further freedom, while the tremendous industrial pressure under which she earns her daily bread stirs the keenest resentment. One day patience, Jewish girlish patience, reaches its limit. A cut in wages, exhausting overtime, or the insults of an overbearing foreman, and an unpremeditated strike results. It may be small, poorly managed, and unsuccessful. The next time things may go better, and the girls come in touch with a union, and take their first lessons in the meaning of collective bargaining. (What is passing in the minds of the rank and file at this stage I am not certain. The obscurities of their psychology are more difficult to fathom.) But I am sure that to the leaders of the young protestants it is not so much in the light of a tower of refuge that the trade union presents itself, but rather as an instrument by means of which they believe that they can control a situation which has become unbearable. As happens to many endowed with the gift of leadership, they travel much farther than they had any idea of when they set out. As time goes on, if they are real leaders, they learn to understand human nature in its varied aspects, the human nature of bosses, as well as the human nature of their fellow-wage-earners. After a year or two as presidents or secretaries of their local, you will hear these fiery-tongued little orators preaching endurance, in order to gain an end not obtainable today, aye, even advising compromise, they to whom the very word compromise had erstwhile been impossible. This implies no loss of principle, no paltering with loyalty, but merely putting in practice the wisdom of the experienced statesman. Nearly all, sooner or later, embrace the socialist philosophy, and many are party members. In that philosophy they find a religious sanction in their most determined struggles after victory, and unfailing support and consolation in the hour of defeat.

As for the rank and file, with them, too, something of the same mental processes probably goes on in a minor degree; but they are much longer in learning their lesson, and meanwhile are often exceedingly hard to direct. They are impulsive beyond belief. It used once to be remarked that Jewish girls were the easiest of all to organize during a strike, and the hardest of all to hold in the union afterwards. This is fortunately not so true today, now that there are a few trained leaders of their own race, whom they trust, and who understand their moods, and know, better than most Americans, how to handle them.

The alien is forever being resented as an obstacle, even if an unconscious one, in the way of organization. Yet as far as women are concerned, it is to this group of aliens in particular that is due the recent tremendous impulse towards organization among the most poorly paid women. In the sewing trades, and in some other trades, such as candy-making, it is the American girls who have accepted conditions, and allowed matters to drift from bad to worse. It is the foreign girl, and especially the Slavic Jewess who has been making the fight for higher wages, shorter hours, better shop management, and above all, for the right to organize; and she has kept it up, year after year, and in city after city, in spite of all expectations to the contrary.

One of the indirect benefits of the colossal strikes in the sewing trades in which these Jewish girls have played so conspicuous a part has been the increasing degree in which those of differing nationalities have come to understand one another, as men and women having common difficulties and common rights, as all alike members of the great working people. Through sore trial many have learnt the meaning of "class consciousness," who never heard of the word.

The new spirit is beginning to touch the Italian girl, and as time goes on, she, too, will be brought into the fold of unionism. To meet with large success, we need as leaders and organizers, Italians, both men and women, of the type of Arthur Carotti, as capable and devoted. The Italian girl is guarded in her home as is the girl of no other race, and this works both for good and for evil. The freedom of the streets, accorded so unquestioningly to their girls by the parents of other nationalities, is conscientiously denied to the Italian girl. No respectable family would permit their daughters to go to any sort of an evening gathering, to attend church or dance or union meeting, unless accompanied by father, mother or brother. While no one can help deeply respecting the principles of family affection and responsibility which dictate this code of manners, there is equally no blinking the fact that it raises a most serious barrier in the way of organizing girls of Italian parentage. Nor on the other hand is it of the least avail to protect the girl against the evils of the industrial system of which the whole family form a part. In especial it does not serve to shield her from the injurious effects of cruel overwork. In no class of our city population do we find more of this atrocious evil, misnamed homework than among Italian families, and whether it is sewing, artificial-flower-or feather-making or nut-picking, neither grown daughters nor little children are spared here. Along with the mother and under her eye, the whole group work day after day, and often far into the night at occupations in themselves harmless enough under proper conditions, but ruinous to health and happiness when permitted to intrude under the family roof. For the wrong of home-work is not to be measured even by the injury suffered by the workers themselves. All parasitic trades, such as these, lower wages in the open market. The manufacturer is continually impelled to cut down wages in his shops to keep pace with the competition of the ill-remunerated home-worker.

As I have said above, I believe that every race that has settled down here in this America has some special contribution to bestow, which will work for good to the whole labor movement. I have instanced the case of the Slavic Jewess as one who has certainly arrived. From others the gift has still to come. From the Italian girl it will come in good time, for they are beginning to enter the unions now, and from the lips of their own fellow-countrywomen even Italian mothers will learn to accept for their daughters the gospel they will not listen to from foreigners like ourselves. The most severely handicapped of all the nationalities so far, to my thinking, is the Polish. They are what is called pure Slavs, that is, with no Jewish blood. They are peasant girls and cannot be better described than they are in a pamphlet on "The Girl Employed in Hotels and Restaurants," published by the Juvenile Protective League to Chicago.

In these places Polish girls are chosen for the following reasons:

1. Because they come of strong peasant stock, and accomplish a large amount of work.

2. They are very thorough in what they do.

3. They are willing to take low wages.

4. They are very submissive, that is, they never protest.

5. They are ignorant of the laws of this country, and are easily imposed upon.

6. They never betray their superiors, no matter what they see.

What a scathing indictment of the American people is set forth in this brief summing up!

The trades that swallow up these strong, patient, long-enduring creatures are work in the meat-canning plants, and dish-washing and scrubbing in restaurants and hotels. These really valuable qualities of physical strength and teachableness, unbalanced by any sense of what is due to themselves, let alone their fellow-workers, prove their industrial ruin.

It is only when they are fortunate enough to get into a better class of work, and when they chance upon some well-organized establishment and are drawn into the union as a matter of course that we find Polish girls in unions at all. Intellectually they are not in the running with the Russian Jewess and the peasant surroundings of their childhood have offered them few advantages. One evening, for instance, there were initiated into a glove-workers' local seventeen new Polish members. Of these two only were able to read and write English, and of the remainder not more than half were able to read and write Polish. As to what is to be the later standing and the ultimate contribution of the Polish girl, I cannot hazard a guess. I only know that she possesses fine qualities which we are not utilizing and which we may be obliterating by the cruel treatment so many thousands of Polish girls are receiving at our hands.

I cannot see any prospect of organizing them in any reasonable numbers at present. The one thing we can do to alleviate their hard lot is to secure legislation—legislation for shorter hours and for the minimum wage.

Their suspiciousness is perhaps the chief barrier in the way of social elevation of the Poles. That Poles can be organized is shown by the remarkable success of the Polish National Alliance and kindred societies. Their capacity for cooeperation is seen in their establishment of their own cooeperative stores.



VII

THE WOMAN ORGANIZER

The problems that face the woman organizer are many and complex. They are the harder to handle, inasmuch as there is very little assistance to be had from any body of tradition on the subject among women workers. The movement for organization among women is still so inchoate. The woman organizer turns to the more experienced men leaders, and finds that often, even with the best will in the world, they cannot help her. The difficulties she meets with are, in detail, so different from theirs that she has to work out her own solutions for herself.

It is indeed a blind alley in which she has so often to move. The workers are young and ignorant, therefore, by all odds, they require the protection of both legislation and organization. Again, the workers are young and ignorant, and therefore they have not learnt the necessity for such protection. Their wages are in most cases low, too low for decent self-support. But just because their wages are so inadequate for bare needs it is in many cases all the more difficult to induce them to deduct from such scanty pay the fifty cents a month which is the smallest sum upon which any organization can pay its way and produce tangible benefits for its members.

Left to her own devices, the solution of her financial difficulties which the average girl finds is always to lessen her expenses so as to manage on the lessening wage that is inevitable in all trades if not resisted. To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room, to spend a few cents a day less for food—these are the near-hand economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind. This is on the economizing side. When it comes to trying to earn more, to work longer hours is surely the self-evident way of increasing the contents of the weekly pay envelope. The younger and inexperienced the worker, the more readily is she fooled into believing that the more work she turns out, under a piece-work system, the more money will she earn, not only in that week but in the succeeding weeks.

To this child-like and simple code of worldly wisdom and of ethics, the policy advised by the organizer is indeed entirely foreign. To some very good girls, indeed, it seems ethically wrong not to work your hardest, or, as they say, do your best, especially when you are urged to. To more, it seems a silly, not to say impossible plan, not to try and earn as big a wage as possible. But the organizer comes in and she approaches the question from the other end. She does not talk about a standard of living, but she preaches it all the time. It is her business and her vocation to bring the girls to see that the first step towards getting more wages is to want more wages, to ask for more wages, and then, seeing that the single girl has no power of bringing about this result by herself, to show them that they must band together with the determination to make their wage square with their ideas of living, and not think that they must forever square their mode of living with their wage.

In the acceptance into the mind of this idea is involved a complete revolution.

It is in making of this ideal theory a living force, by helping girls to put it into practice in everyday shop life that the girl organizer has her special work cut out for her. And here she necessarily contrasts favorably with the average man organizer when he tries to deal with girls, because she understands the girl's work and the girl's problems better, and the girl knows that she does.