The most eloquent characteristic of the Supreme Court’s affirmation was the fact that it was essentially founded simply upon clear, human truth, firmly and widely ascertained, founded on a respect, not only for the past, but for the future of the whole nation.

Too often does one hear that “law has nothing to do with equity,” till one might believe that law was made for law’s sake, and not as a means of deliverance from injustice.  “The end of litigation is justice.  We believe that truth and justice are more sacred than any personal consideration.”  Such was the conception of the office of the law expressed by Justice Brewer twenty years before, on his appointment to the Supreme Bench.  It was this conception of law that made the determination of the Oregon case a great decision in our country’s history.

From time immemorial, women as well as men have been workers of the world.  The vital feature of the statement that six million women are now gainfully employed in this country is not the “entrance” of multitudinous women into industry, but the fact that their industry, being now carried on in public instead of private, has been acknowledged and paid.  This acknowledgment has led to the establishment of juster terms for women’s labor by the Federal Supreme Court.  Such an establishment, as the opinion of the court affirmed, is surely a distinct gain, not only for women, but for children, for men, for the race.

When the preparation of food and clothing, the traditional household labor of women, passed in large measure from household fires and spinning-wheels into the canning factories and garment trades with the invention of machinery, women simply continued their traditional labor outside their houses instead of inside them.[42] The accounts of the laundry, the shirt-waist and the cloak making trades in New York seem to show that, where men and women engage in the same field of activity, their work is, by a natural division, not competitive or antagonistic, but complementary.  Indeed, so little is it antagonistic that the very first spark that lit the fire of the largest strike of women that ever occurred in this country, the shirt-waist makers’ strike, was kindled by an offensive injustice to a man.

The chronicles of what self-supporting women have given and received in their work in wage and in vitality, these working girls’ budgets obtained by the Consumers’ League, will not have told their story truly unless they have evoked with their narrative the presence of that impersonal sense of right instinctive in the factory girls who go year after year to Albany to fight against the long Christmas season hours for the shop-girls, in the cloak makers in their effort to stop sweated home work, in the responsible common-sense of countless working women.  So that the fact that six million women are now gainfully employed in this country may finally tend to secure wiser adjustments and fairer returns for the labor, not only of women, but of all the workers of the world.