200 THE AMERICA* JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
much before seven at night the victim of an economic system that asks the longest possible hours at the smallest wage. The nc precludes domestic life. The other, neither her own clamor nor philanthropy nor public sentiment can as yet increase. Even the best intentioned employer is often shut off from schemes of reform by that system of competition which ordains that he must undersell or himself become bankrupt. To undersell gen- erally means that he must underpay workers or else supersede them with a cheaper kind with half educated or miseducated and wholly inexpert girls, or else with the latest foreign indus- trial invaders who can subsist on sixty cents a week. Fiercer Arrows the struggle for existence in the routine employments, due partly to glut of unskilled labor. The misery thus engen- dered tends to excite deplorable class antagonism ; and whenever workers are arrayed against capitalists, caste warfare usually threatens.
An ounce of prevention here would be worth many pounds of cure. One way to allay this social discontent is to raise the whole morale of labor by first uplifting the female. Whatever promotes the intelligence, technical ability and material pros- perity of women promotes at once the welfare of the entire body cf workers; secures them better homes and thereby creates stronger local attachments and civic spirit in fact, changes tendencies that might prove revolutionary into safe and useful aspirations.
The outlook brightens. Enlightened opinion in America and abroad is slowly preventing by legislation and otherwise both individual and corporate oppression. Under present conditions, the female breadwinner, on the lowest round of the ladder, suffers most. Her lot would be eased, I repeat, if influential advocates of her own sex, in clubs and out of them, would seriously devote themselves to bettering her situation. So much in any event they can do plead with legislators for immigration laws that will improve the personnel of the foreign competition ; for adequate factory and inspection laws, protecting the workingwoman from accident to life and limb, and mitigating as far as possible the
