“How move them?  How touch them off?” he asked himself.

But the absorbing interest—­the faces—­the shadowy scenes—­the gas-lit interiors—­everywhere human beings, everywhere life, packed, crowded, evolving.

At the end of the week he stopped, though the fever was still on him.  He had gained two hundred and fifty subscribers; he had distributed twelve hundred copies of the paper.  He now felt that he could delay no longer in bringing out the next number.  So he sat down, and, with Sally Heffer’s words ringing in his mind, he wrote his famous editorial, “It is the Women”: 

It is the women who bear the burden of this world—­the poor women.  Perhaps they have beauty when they marry.  Then they plunge into drudgery.  All day and night they are in dark and damp rooms, scrubbing, washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing.  They wear the cheapest clothes—­thin calico wrappers.  They take their husbands’ thin pay-envelopes, and manage the finances.  They stint and save—­they buy one carrot at a time, one egg.  When rent-week comes—­and it comes twice a month—­they cut the food by half to pay for housing.  They are underfed, they are denied everything but toil—­save love.  Child after child they bear.  The toil increases, the stint is sharper, the worry infinite.  Now they must clothe their children, feed them, dress them, wash them, amuse them.  They must endure the heart-sickness of seeing a child underfed.  They must fight the demons of disease.  Possibly they must stop a moment in the speed of their labor and face death.  Only for a moment!  Need calls them:  mouths ask for food, floors for the broom, and the pay-envelope for keen reckonings.  Possibly then the husband will begin to drink—­possibly he will come home and beat his wife, drag her about the floor, blacken her eyes, break a rib.  The next day the task is taken up again—­the man is fed, the children clothed, the food marketed, the floor scrubbed, the dress sewn.  And then as the family grows there come hard times.  The man is out of work—­he wants to work but cannot.  Rent and the butcher and grocer must be paid, but there are no wages brought home.  The woman takes in washing.  She goes through the streets to the more prosperous and drags home a basket of soiled clothes.  The burden of life grows heavier—­the husband becomes accustomed to the changed relationships.  Very often he ceases to be a wage-earner and loafs about saloons.  From then on the woman wrestles with worlds of trouble—­unimaginable difficulties.  Truly, running a state may be easier than running a family.  And yet the woman toils on; she does not complain; she sets three meals each day before husband and children; she sees that they have clothes; she gives the man his drink money; she endures his cruelty; she plans ambitiously for her children.  Or possibly the man begins to work again, and then one day is killed in an accident.  There is danger of the family breaking up.  But