As to the final effect on wages, I regard the whole aspect of things as purely transitional, and must answer from personal conviction in the matter.

The entire movement appears to me a part of the natural evolution from barbaric law and restriction, and a necessary demonstration of the spiritual equality of the sexes.  I regard it also as the nurse and developer of many small virtues in which women are especially deficient,—­punctuality, unvarying quality of work, a sense of business honor and of personal fidelity, each to all and all to each.  But I cannot feel that it is a permanent state, or that when the essential has been accomplished women will have the same need or the same desire that now rules.  I believe that wages must necessarily fluctuate and tend to the mere point of subsistence when either child labor or the lowest grade of woman’s labor exists, and that the only way out of the complications we face is in an alteration of ideals.  Statistics and general reports show the demoralization of family life where such work goes on, and the fact that in the long run the workman loses rather than gains where his family share his labor.

The lowering of wage may be considered, then, as in one sense remedial, and the present state of things as in part the mere action of inevitable and inescapable law.  But it is impossible to make this plain in present limits.  Having passed through every stage of feeling,—­sick pity, burning indignation, and tempestuous desire for instant action,—­I have come at last to regard all as our education in justice and a demand for training in such wise as shall render unskilled labor more and more impossible.  So long as it exists, however, I see no outlook but the fluctuating and uncertain wage, the natural result of the existence of the lowest order of workers.

For them as for us it is the development of the individual from the mass that is the chief end of any real civilization.  No Utopias of any past or present can bring this at once.

     “Each man to himself and each woman to herself, such is the word of
     the past and the present, and the true word of immortality.”

       “No one can acquire for another, not one;
        No one can grow for another, not one.”

Despair might easily be the outcome of a first glance at these conditions; but the stir at all points is assurance of a better day to come.

Legislation can do much.  The appointment of women inspectors, lately brought about for New York, is imperative at all points, since women will tell women the evils they would never mention to men.  Law can also demand decent sanitary conditions, and affix a penalty for every violation.  Beyond this, and the awakening of the public conscience as to what is owed the honest worker, little can be said.  Enlightenment, a better chance at every point for the struggling mass,—­that is the work for each and all of them, and for those who would aid the constant demand, and labor for justice in its largest sense and its most rigorous application.  With justice on both sides, abuses die of pure inanition.  The tenement-house system, every evil that hedges about special trades, every wrong born of cupidity and ignorance, and all base features of trade at its worst, end once for all, and we see the end and aim of the social life, whether for employer or employed.