need for everyone so engaged. One year is spent in learning the trade,
and the girls last at it only from three to four years afterwards.
Some of them enter marriage, but many of them are thrown on the human
waste-heap. One company employs nearly 1,000 women, so that a large
number are affected by these vile and inhuman conditions. The girls in
the trade are mostly Slovaks, Poles and Bohemians, who have not long
been in this country. In their inexperience they count $1.50 as good
wages, although gained at ever so great a physical cost."

These are intolerable conditions, and that tens of thousands are
enduring similar hardships in the course of earning a living and
contributing their share towards the commercial output of the country
only aggravates the cruelty and the injustice to the helpless and
defrauded girls. It is not an individual problem merely. It is a
national responsibility shared by every citizen to see that such
cruelty and such injustice shall cease. No system of commercial
production can be permanently maintained which ignores the primitive
rights of the human workers to such returns for labor as shall provide
decent food, clothing, shelter, education and recreation for the
worker and for those dependent upon him or her, as well as steadiness
of employment, and the guarantee of such working conditions as shall
not be prejudicial to health.

If the community is not to be moved either by pity or by a sense of
justice then perhaps it will awake to a realization of the national
danger involved when so many of the workers, and especially when
so many of the girls and women work under circumstances ruinous to
health, and affording, besides, small chance for all-round normal
development on either the individual or the social side. These are
evils whose results do not die out with the generation primarily