in the immediate future is that the very reason why organization is so urgently needed by domestic workers is the reason why it is so difficult to form organizations, the individual isolation in which the girls live and work.  The desire for common action assuredly is there; one little group after another are meeting and talking over their difficulties, and planning how they can overcome them.  The obstacles in the way of forming unions of domestic workers are tremendous.  What such groups need, above all, is a union headquarters, with comfortable and convenient rooms, in which girls could meet their friends during their times off, or in which they could just rest, if they wanted to, for many have no friend’s house to go to during their precious free days.  Such a headquarters should conduct an employment agency.  Other activities would probably grow out of such a center, and the workers cooeperating would help towards the solving of that domestic problem which is their concern even more intimately than it is that of those whom, as things are, they so unwillingly serve.  That the finest type of women are already awake, and nearing the stage when they themselves recognize the need of organization, is evident from the fact that in Chicago, Buffalo and Seattle, there lately sprang up almost simultaneously, small associations of household workers formed to secure regular hours and better living conditions.

There is no class of women or girls more urgently in need of a radical change in their economic condition than department-store clerks.  To this need even the public has of late become somewhat awakened, thanks mainly to a troop of investigators and to the writers in the magazines, who on the one hand have roused nation-wide horror by means of revelations regarding the white-slave traffic, and on the other have brought to that same national audience painful enlightenment as to the chronic starvation of both soul and body endured by so many brave and patient young creatures, who on four, five or six dollars a week just manage to exist, but who in so doing, are cheated of all that makes life worth living in the present, and are disinherited of any prospect of home, health and happiness in the future.

This story has been told again and again.  Yet the public has not yet learned to relate it to any effectual remedy.  Undoubtedly organization has done a great deal for this class in other countries, notably in England and in Germany, and in this country also, in the few cities where it has been brought about.  But meanwhile their numbers are increasing, and it hardly seems human for us to wait while all these young lives are being ruined in the hope that a few years hence the department-store clerks succeeding them may be able to save themselves through organization, when there is another remedy at hand.  That remedy is legislation to cover thoroughly hours, wages and conditions of work.  No one suggests depending exclusively on laws.  One reason, probably, why