The whole outcome of the strike in its effect on women’s wages in the shirt-waist trade, their income and outlay in their work, both financially and in vitality, cannot, of course, yet be fully known.  The statement that there has been a general rise of wages must be modified in other ways than that suggested by the depletion of Anna Klotin’s income in the year since the strike.  In factories where price on piece-work is subject to arbitration between a Union committee of the workers and the firm, the committee is not always able to obtain a fair price for labor.  One of the largest factories made a verbal agreement to observe Union conditions, but it signed no written contract, and has since broken its word.  It discriminates against Union members, and it insists on Sunday work and on night work for more than two nights a week.  Further, during the seventeen weeks of the strike many shirt-waist orders ordinarily filled in New York were placed with New Jersey and Pennsylvania firms.  The present New York season has been unusually dull, and now, on this writing, early in August, many girls are discouraged on account of the slight amounts they earn through slack work.

“But that is not the fault of the employers,” said one of the workers.  “You must be reasonable for them.  You cannot ask them for work they are not able to obtain to give you.”  Her remark is quoted both from its wisdom and for another purpose.  She was the girl who will always be disabled by the attack of her employer’s thug.  Her quiet and instinctive mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious generosity and nobility.

Looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be its spirit.  Something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit, manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers’ effort for better terms of life.

“The most remarkable feature of the strike,” says a writer in the Call,[18] “is the absence of leaders.  All the girls seem to be imbued with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial uprisings.  One like all are ready to take the chairmanship, secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison.”

There has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers’ strike.  Perhaps there never will be another quite like it again.  When every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have all been admitted, the fact remains that the New York strike said, “All for one and one for all,” with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country—­perhaps new in the voice of the world.  Wonderful it is to know that in that world to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who, in the