light.

Previously to this invasion of the industrial field by woman there had
arisen conditions that were in themselves peculiarly menacing to the
social fabric. Some of the philosophers of the period, rummaging amongst
the dubious and misunderstood facts of commercial and industrial history,
had discovered what they were pleased to term "the law of supply and
demand"; and this they expounded with so ingenious a sophistry, and so
copious a wealth of illustration and example that what is at best but a
faulty and imperfectly applicable principle, limited and cut into by all
manner of other considerations, came to be accepted as the sole
explanation and basis of material prosperity and an infallible rule for
the proper conduct of industrial affairs. In obedience to this "law"--for,
interpreting it in its straitest sense they understood it to be
mandatory--employers and employees alike regulated by its iron authority
all their dealings with one another, throwing off the immemorial relations
of mutual dependence and mutual esteem as tending to interfere with
beneficent operation. The employer came to believe conscientiously that it
was not only profitable and expedient, but under all circumstances his
duty, to obtain his labor for as little money as possible, even as he sold
its product for as much. Considerations of humanity were not banished from
his heart, but most sternly excluded from his business. Many of these
misguided men would give large sums to various charities; would found
universities, hospitals, libraries; would even stop on their way to
relieve beggars in the street; but for their own work-people they had no
care. Straman relates in his "Memoirs" that a wealthy manufacturer once
said to one of his mill-hands who had asked for an increase of his wages
because unable to support his family on the pay that he was getting: "Your
family is nothing to me. I cannot afford to mix benevolence with my
business." Yet this man, the author adds, had just given a thousand