the freeing of the negro slave has been so often merely a nominal freeing is because he was able to play so small a part himself in the gaining of his freedom.  It was a gift, truly, from the master race.  But no one, surely, would use that argument in reference to children, and an immense proportion of the department-store employes are but children, children between fourteen and eighteen, and in some states much younger.  One hears of occasional instances in which even children have banded together and gone on strike.  School-children have done it.  The little button-sewers of Muscatine, Iowa, formed a juvenile union during the long strike of 1911.  But these are such exceptional instances that they can hardly count in normal times.  And that such a large body of children and very young girls are included among department-store employes adds immensely to the difficulty of gaining over the grown-up women to organization.

[Illustration:  A BINDERY

Hand folders on platform.  Machine folder and hand gatherers below.]

[Illustration:  INTERIOR OF ONE OF THE LARGEST AND BEST EQUIPPED WAIST AND CLOAK FACTORIES IN NEW YORK CITY]

Perhaps at some future time children may mature mentally earlier.  If along with this, education is more efficient, and the civic duty of a common responsibility for the good of all is taught universally in our schools, even the child at fourteen may become class-conscious, and willing to fight and struggle for a common aim.  But if that day ever comes, it will be in the far future, and let us hope that then childish energies may be free to find other channels of expression and childish cooeperation be exerted for happier aims.  The child of today is often temporarily willful and disobedient, but on the whole he (and more often she) is pathetically patient and long-suffering under all sorts of hardships and injustices, and has no idea of anything like an industrial rebellion.  Indeed overwork and ill-usage have upon children the markedly demoralizing effect of cowing them permanently, so that in oppressing a child you do more than deprive him of his childhood, you weaken what ought to be the backbone of his maturity.  But improve conditions, whether by law or otherwise, and you will have a more independent “spunky” child, a better prospect of having him, when grown up, a more wholesomely natural rebel.  Indeed more or less, this applies to human beings of any age.

As regards the minimum wage, the objection raised by certain among the conservative labor leaders has been that it will retard organization and check independence of spirit.  This reasoning seems quite academic, in view of the fact that it is the most oppressed workers who are usually the least able and willing to assert themselves.  Give them shorter hours or better wages, and they will soon be pleading for still shorter hours and yet higher wages.  Wherever the regulation of wages, through that most democratic method, that