uprisings. One like all are ready to take the chairmanship,
secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison."

There has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers'
strike. Perhaps there never will be another quite like it again. When
every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have
all been admitted, the fact remains that the New York strike said, "All
for one and one for all," with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the
voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country--perhaps new
in the voice of the world. Wonderful it is to know that in that world
to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who,
in the meanest quarter of New York, on stinted food, in scanty clothes,
drained with faint health and overwork, could yet walk through her life,
giving away half of her wage by day to some one else, enjoying the
theatre at night, and, in the poorest circumstances, pouring her slight
strength out richly like a song for pleasure and devotion. Wonderful it
is to know that when Natalya Urusova was in darkness, hunger, fright, and
cold on Blackwell's Island, she still could be responsibly concerned for
the fortunes of a stranger and had something she could offer to her
nobly. Wonderful to know that, after her very bones had been broken by
the violence of a thug of an employer, one of these girls could still
speak for perfect fairness for him with an instinct for justice truly
large and thrilling. Such women as that ennoble life and give to the
world a richer and altered conception of justice--a justice of
imagination and the heart, concerned not at all with vengeance, but
simply with the beauty of the perfect truth for the fortunes of all
mortal creatures.

Besides the value to the workers of the spirit of the shirt-waist strike,
they gained another advantage. This was of graver moment even than an