employed displaced or excluded some man, who, compelled to seek a lower employment, displaced another, and so on, until the least capable or most unlucky of the series became a tramp—­a nomadic mendicant criminal!  The number of these dangerous vagrants in the beginning of the twentieth century of their era has been estimated by Holobom at no less than seven and a half blukuks!  Of course, they were as tow to the fires of sedition, anarchy and insurrection.  It does not very nearly relate to our present purpose, but it is impossible not to note in passing that this unhappy result, directly flowing from woman’s invasion of the industrial field, was unaccompanied by any material advantage to herself.  Individual women, here and there one, may themselves have earned the support that they would otherwise not have received, but the sex as a whole was not benefited.  They provided for themselves no better than they had previously been provided for, and would still have been provided for, by the men whom they displaced.  The whole somber incident is unrelieved by a single gleam of light.

Previously to this invasion of the industrial field by woman there had arisen conditions that were in themselves peculiarly menacing to the social fabric.  Some of the philosophers of the period, rummaging amongst the dubious and misunderstood facts of commercial and industrial history, had discovered what they were pleased to term “the law of supply and demand”; and this they expounded with so ingenious a sophistry, and so copious a wealth of illustration and example that what is at best but a faulty and imperfectly applicable principle, limited and cut into by all manner of other considerations, came to be accepted as the sole explanation and basis of material prosperity and an infallible rule for the proper conduct of industrial affairs.  In obedience to this “law”—­for, interpreting it in its straitest sense they understood it to be mandatory—­employers and employees alike regulated by its iron authority all their dealings with one another, throwing off the immemorial relations of mutual dependence and mutual esteem as tending to interfere with beneficent operation.  The employer came to believe conscientiously that it was not only profitable and expedient, but under all circumstances his duty, to obtain his labor for as little money as possible, even as he sold its product for as much.  Considerations of humanity were not banished from his heart, but most sternly excluded from his business.  Many of these misguided men would give large sums to various charities; would found universities, hospitals, libraries; would even stop on their way to relieve beggars in the street; but for their own work-people they had no care.  Straman relates in his “Memoirs” that a wealthy manufacturer once said to one of his mill-hands who had asked for an increase of his wages because unable to support his family on the pay that he was getting:  “Your family is nothing