thread needles for them far into the night that they may sew without a
moment's interruption during the next day; those girls who insert
eyelets into shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case, each case
containing twenty-four pairs of shoes, are striking victims of the
over-speeding which is so characteristic of our entire factory system.

Girls working in factories and laundries are also open to the
possibilities of accidents. The loss of only two fingers upon the right
hand, or a broken wrist, may disqualify an operator from continuing in
the only work in which she is skilled and make her struggle for
respectability even more difficult. Varicose veins and broken arches in
the feet are found in every occupation in which women are obliged to
stand for hours, but at any moment either one may develop beyond purely
painful symptoms into crippling incapacity. One such girl recently
returning home after a long day's work deliberately sat down upon the
floor of a crowded street car, explaining defiantly to the conductor and
the bewildered passengers that "her feet would not hold out another
minute." A young woman who only last summer broke her hand in a mangle
was found in a rescue home in January, explaining her recent experience
by the phrase that she was "up against it when leaving the hospital in
October."

In spite of many such heart-breaking instances the movement for
safeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidents
proceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of a
miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate of
industrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, its
hideousness might well have been increased had it been able to
demonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and the
complete moral disaster which overtook their victims.