firm, the committee is not always able to obtain a fair price for labor.
One of the largest factories made a verbal agreement to observe Union
conditions, but it signed no written contract, and has since broken its
word. It discriminates against Union members, and it insists on Sunday
work and on night work for more than two nights a week. Further, during
the seventeen weeks of the strike many shirt-waist orders ordinarily
filled in New York were placed with New Jersey and Pennsylvania firms.
The present New York season has been unusually dull, and now, on this
writing, early in August, many girls are discouraged on account of the
slight amounts they earn through slack work.

"But that is not the fault of the employers," said one of the workers.
"You must be reasonable for them. You cannot ask them for work they are
not able to obtain to give you." Her remark is quoted both from its
wisdom and for another purpose. She was the girl who will always be
disabled by the attack of her employer's thug. Her quiet and instinctive
mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers
had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious
generosity and nobility.

Looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its
profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be
its spirit. Something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a
mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit,
manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers' effort for better terms of
life.

"The most remarkable feature of the strike," says a writer in the
_Call_,[18] "is the absence of leaders. All the girls seem to be imbued
with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial