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out to work and what she gets who stays at home, and she who stays at home wins it."'"

1

With something of exaggeration there is, no doubt, much of truth in this proverb of the Berkshire women. In the eagerness to increase the family income it is not sufficiently considered that, in the absence of the wife and mother, great loss must necessarily be sustained in the expenditure of that income; and secondly, that the illeffects on the health of the family, on the duration of the laboring power, and on the moral elements of industry may be sufficient in many cases to offset the nominal gain achieved by stripping the house of its service and depriving the household of their proper care. The failure to

appreciate that a penny saved is a penny earned, lies at the bottom of many a far-reaching mistake in domestic life as in productive industry. Waste in food, clothing, and utensils; waste in laboring force through ill-prepared and ill-preserved food; waste of the vital endowment of the rising generation through lack of that constant care which is the essential condition of well-being in childhood; waste of character and the formation of indolent and vicious habits through neglect to instruct and train the young, and through making the house cheerless and distasteful to the mature: the waste in these and many other forms which the entry of the wife and daughter on wage labor necessarily implies, in greater or less degree, will surely balance the addition of many shillings a week to the family income.'

1 Report of 1867-8, p. 17, n.

“The wear and tear of a neglected home," says Mr. R. Smith Baker, "is greater than the income which the wife's labor adds to the weekly means; and he who can earn enough and to spare ought to feel it a degradation for the wife of his bosom to mingle in these dangerous assemblies. Moreover, a workingman's family is his wealth when well brought up; his bane when sickly and unhealthy."

The disposition to allow married women to undertake paid labor in public places varies greatly in different communities. Mr. Carey in his Essay on Wages (1835) states that out of one thousand females in the Lawrence Factory at Lowell, there were but eleven married wo

Yet, after all, there is an increasing multitude of women who, through having no house to keep, or through the straitness of the family means, have no choice but to enter the mill or the shop, and submit to the rude hustlings of the market-place-and room has not been made for them.

It may sound strangely that even in the United States, where it is of general consent that women are treated with higher relative consideration than in any other country in the world, respect and sympathy for them are wanting in such a degree as to deprive them of any part of their equitable wages. I speak, however, of respect and sympathy for women as laborers. In their "sphere," to use the phrase which so exasperates the advocates of suffrage without regard to sex, women have always received homage and service, but as wage-laborers in the public market they have suffered not a little in the past. This has not been from want of chivalry, but from defects

men (p. 88, n.) The proportion in these later days is much greater. I am indebted to the Hon. Wm. P. Haines for the information that of 1506 and 1203 persons employed respectively by the Pepperell Manufacturing Company and by the Laconia Company, both of Biddeford, Me., engaged in cotton-spinning, 105 in the former and 135 in the latter were married women.

Much indisposition to allow the wife to go into the mill is seen in the flax and jute districts of Scotland. Of 784 women employed in the mills at Arbroath, only 5 per cent were married. "It appears," say the commissioners of the Local Government Board (1873), "to be considered somewhat discreditable for a woman to work in a factory after her marriage, and she does so only under the pressure of a stern necessity." At the same time almost 28 per cent of the females of Scotland were actually bread-winners. This is due to the excess of spinsters previously noted. The married women employed in the textile manufactories of England and Wales are estimated by Mr. W. C. Taylor, Inspector of Factories, at about 150,000 (Soc. Sc. Trans., 1874, p. 571). "Married women in factories are exceptional," says Mr. Phipps in his Report of 1870 on the Condition of the Industrial Classes of Wurtemburg (p. 223).

M. LePlay, in his work on the Organization of Labor, dwells strongly on the economical advantages of leaving the mother and daughter at the fireside.

of education. The need that woman is coming to have, in modern life, to enter the competitions of industry, has not become sufficiently familiar to the public mind; the ide has been strange, her image in such garb unwelcome.' That public opinion which should open to her avenues of employment; which should be a strong support to her in her demands for fair remuneration; which should be a defence to her in her close pursuit of employment, in her urgent and persistent application for work, in her necessary exposure to gaze and comment, and in her contact with much that is strange and rude, has not yet been created in such a degree as to give to the sex all that freedom of industrial movement which might be consistent with feminine purity and delicacy. We have not yet come to appreciate the obligation which their necessity imposes upon us, as men and gentlemen, to follow them with our earnest, active sympathy, and to protect and champion them not less in their labor than at dance or festival.

And what is the remedy? Agitation and the diffusion of correct ideas. Let gifted women continue, as in the past, to appeal for public respect and sympathy for their sisters in their work; let the schools teach that public opinion may powerfully affect wages, and that nothing which depends on human volition is "inexorable;" let the statistics of women's wages be carefully gathered and persistently held up to view. Efforts like these will not fail to strengthen and support woman in her resort to market, thus enabling her the better to realize the condition upon which alone she can expect to receive the highest wages which the existing state of industry will allow.

"Fancy," says Miss Emily Faithfull, "a gentleman seeking remu. nerative work sub rosa! And yet this is the state of mind in which so many ladies come to our Industrial and Educational Bureau, that they even refuse to state their requirements to the lady manager, but insist upon seeing me personally on 'strictly private and confidential business.' Public opinion is to be blamed for this; and unless the press will help us to strike a blow at the false pride now in our midst, parents will still neglect to place their daughters in honorable independent positions."— Letter to the London Times, 1876.

CHAPTER XIX.

MAY ANY ADVANTAGE BE ACQUIRED BY THE WAGES CLASS THROUGH STRIKES OR TRADES-UNIONS?

It was seen in our analysis of the operation of competition (Chapter X.) that the members of the wages class on their side, and the members of the employing class on theirs, act singly, each for himself, with individual spontaneity; and that out of this complete mobility of the individual, in subjection only to his own sense of his own interest, issue the highest conceivable industrial order and an absolutely right division of burdens and diffusion of benefits.

The question in the present chapter is, whether, there being an acknowledged failure of competition, greater or less, on the side of the wages class, from ignorance, inertia, poverty, or the undue anxiety of individuals to snatch, each for himself, at the first employment offered, any thing can be added to the real power of this class in competition, through restraints voluntarily adopted. The perfect reasonableness of supposing that some advantage might be derived by the wages class from such arrange ments, will be seen if we compare their situation with that of an audience seeking to escape from a crowded theatre which has taken fire. There may be time enough to allow the safe discharge of every soul, and in that case the individual interest of each person clearly coincides

with the interest of the audience taken collectivelynamely, that he should fall-in precisely according to his present situation relative to the common place of exit. Yet we know that, human nature being what it is, panic is likely to arise and a crazy rush ensue, cach trying to get before his neighbor, with the certain result that the discharge of the whole mass will be impeded, and the strong probability that not a few will be trampled to death. If now, upon men in such a situation, discipline can be imposed, and the procedure which is for the interest alike of each and of all can be allowed to go forward steadily, swiftly, and surely under authoritative direction, a great deal of misery may be prevented. Discipline, restraint, create no force, but they may save much waste.

In just such a situation, say those who are the professed advocates of the "cause of labor," is the wages class in many if not in most communities. Grant that the true interest of each member consists with the interest of the whole, no one will assert that each man's interest, as he may understand it and be prepared to act on it, necessarily consists with the good of all. When industry slackens and employment becomes scarce, there is the same danger to the mass, from the headlong haste and greed of individuals, as in the case of the theatre just referred to. A mistaken sense of self-interest may even pervert competition from its true ends, and make its force destructive. If, then, it is urged, bodies of labor can be put under discipline so that they shall proceed in order and with temper, great injury may be averted: injury which once wrought may become permanent.

There is, surely, nothing unreasonable in this claim. Let us, therefore, without prejudice procced to consider the agencies by which, under this plan, it is proposed to meet the infirmities of the laboring classes.

The issue is not whether joint action is superior to the individual action of persons enlightened as to their industrial interests, but whether joint action may not be better

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