Much more serious is the glaring discrepancy in the wages paid to men and to women.  For doing precisely the same work as a man and often doing it better, woman receives a much lower wage.  The reasons are several and specious.  We are told that men have families to support, that women do not have such expensive tastes as men, that they are incapable of doing as much as men, that by granting them equal wages one of the inducements to marry is removed.  These arguments are generally used with the greatest gravity by bachelors.  If men have families to support, women by the hundreds support brothers and sisters and weak parents.  That they are incapable of doing as much sounds unconvincing to one who has seen the work of sweat-shops.  The argument that men have more expensive tastes to satisfy is too feeble to deserve attention.  Finally, when men argue that women should be forced to marry by giving them smaller wages, they are simply reverting to the time-honoured idea that the goal of every women’s ambition should be fixed as matrimony.  If the low wages of women produced no further consequence, one might dismiss the matter as not of essential importance; but inadequate pay has been found too frequently to be a direct cause of prostitution.  No girl can well keep body and soul together on four dollars a week and some business managers have been known to inform their women employees with frankness that a “gentleman friend” is a necessary adjunct to a limited income.

The women who suffer most from low wages are probably the teachers in our primary schools.  They start usually on a salary of about three hundred and fifty dollars a year.  For this each teacher performs all the minute labour and bears all the nervous strain of instructing sixty pupils six and a half hours a day and of correcting dozens of papers far into the night.  And when crime increases or the pupils are not universally successful in business, the school teacher has the added pleasure of getting blamed for it, being told that she ought to have trained them better.  These facts lend some colour to Mark Twain’s sage reflection that God at first made idiots—­that was for practice; then he made school boards.

One of the most interesting examples of recent evolution in the industrial status of women is the decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois in the so-called Ritchie Case.  The last Legislature of Illinois passed a law limiting to ten hours the working day of women in factories and stores.  Now, as far back as 1893, the Legislature had passed a similar law limiting woman’s labour to eight hours; but the Supreme Court in 1895 declared it unconstitutional on the ground that it was an arbitrary and unreasonable interference with the right of women to contract for the sale of their labour.  When, therefore, this year a ten-hour bill was tried, W.C.  Ritchie, who had secured the nullification of the act of 1893, again protested.  The decision of the Court, rendered April 21, 1910, is an excellent proof of the great advance made within two decades in the position of women.  Reversing completely its judgment of 1895, the Court left far behind it mere technicalities of law and found a sanction for its change of front in the experience of humanity and of common sense.  These are its conclusions: