Disguise this fact as we will; bear testimony to the inefficiency and incompetency of the workers; admit every trial and perplexity of employers, every effort to better conditions, yet there remains in the background always this shadow, in which the woman who elects to earn an honest living must walk. No more heroic battle has ever been fought than this daily one, waged silently and uncomplainingly in our midst by these workers. Their lot is all part of the general evolution from disorder, ignorance, and indifference, into the larger life, opening so slowly that impatient spirits demand dynamite to hasten the process, but as surely as the earth marches forever on its round toward that central sun that draws each smallest star of that system we call our universe.
It is certain that this is a transition period; that material conditions born of a phenomenal material progress have deadened the sense as to what constitutes real progress, and that the working-woman of to-day contends not only with visible but invisible obstacles, the nature of which we are but just beginning to discern. Twenty years ago one of the wisest of modern French thinkers, M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, wrote of women wage-earners: "From the economic point of view, woman, who has next to no material force, and whose arms are advantageously replaced by the least machine, can have useful place and obtain fair remuneration only by the development of the best qualities of her intelligence. It is the inexorable law of our civilization--the principle and formula even of social progress, that _mechanical engines are to accomplish every operation of human labor which does not proceed directly from the mind_. The hand of man is each day deprived of a portion of its original task, but this general gain is a loss for the particular and for the classes whose only instrument of labor is a pair of feeble arms."
Untrained intelligence finds earning a more and more difficult task, and for all of us it has become plain, that in the mighty problem given us by a civilization which at so many points fails to civilize, every force must be brought to bear upon its solution. These pale, anæmic, undeveloped girls swarming in factory and shop, are the mothers of a large part of the coming generation, defrauded before birth of all the elements that make strong bodies and teachable souls. It is not alone the present with which we deal. Out of the future comes a demand as instant, and justice to-day bears its fruit in larger life for other days to come. For this must be two awakenings. One for the looker-on in the struggle who has no eyes for what lies still in shadow. The other for the worker, who must join the army already aroused, realizing its limitations, reaching out for training and larger opportunity, and seeking with the eagerness born of hard conditions, some permanent way of escape. And for watcher and worker alike the word is the same: