historic trade-union effort, the feebler and newer movement on the part
of the employers is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who is
not only devising recreational and educational plans, but is placing
before the employer much disturbing information upon the cost of living
in relation to the pitiful wages of working girls. Certainly employers
are growing ashamed to use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence of
employing only the girl "protected by home influences" as a device for
reducing wages. Help may also come from the consumers, for an increasing
number of them, with compunctions in regard to tempted young employees,
are not only unwilling to purchase from the employer who underpays his
girls and thus to share his guilt, but are striving in divers ways to
modify existing conditions.

As working women enter fresh fields of labor which ever open up anew as
the old fields are submerged behind them, society must endeavor to
speedily protect them by an amelioration of the economic conditions
which are now so unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health and morals.
The world-wide movement for establishing governmental control of
industrial conditions is especially concerned for working women.
Fourteen of the European countries prohibit all night work for women and
almost every civilized country in the world is considering the number of
hours and the character of work in which women may be permitted to
safely engage.

Although amelioration comes about so slowly that many young girls are
sacrificed each year under conditions which could so easily and
reasonably be changed, nevertheless it is apparently better to overcome
the dangers in this new and freer life, which modern industry has opened
to women, than it is to attempt to retreat into the domestic industry of
the past; for all statistics of prostitution give the largest number of