“In most cases the seller of a commodity can send it or carry it from place to place, and market to market, with perfect ease.  He need not be on the spot; he generally can send a sample; he usually treats by correspondence.  A merchant sits in his counting-room, and by a few letters and forms transports and distributes the subsistence of a whole city from continent to continent.  In other cases, as the shopkeeper, the ebb and flow of passing multitudes supplies the want of locomotion for him.  This is a true market.  Here competition acts rapidly, fully, simply, fairly.  It is totally otherwise with a day laborer who has no commodity to sell.  He must himself be present at every market, which means costly, personal locomotion.  He cannot correspond with his employer; he cannot send a sample of his strength, nor do employers knock at his cottage door.”

It is plain, then, that many causes are at work to depress the wages even of skilled workers, far more than can be enumerated here.  If this is true for men, how much more strongly can limitations be stated for women, as we ask, “Why do not women receive a better wage?” Many of the reasons are historical, and must be considered in their origin and growth.  Taking her as worker to-day, precisely the same general causes are in operation that govern the wages of men, with the added disability of sex, always in the way of equal mobility of labor.

Wherever for any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate.  The trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized.  They focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there.  Great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent of the entire population.  Eagerly as they seek work, it is far more difficult for them to obtain it than for men.  They require to be much more mobile and active in their move toward the labor market, yet are disabled by timidity, by physical weakness, and by their liability to insult or outrage arising from the fact of sex.  Men who would secure a place tramp from town to town, from street to street, or shop to shop, persisting through all rebuffs, till their end is accomplished.  They go into suspicious and doubtful localities, encounter strangers, and sleep among casual companions.  In this fashion they relieve the pressure at congested points, and keep the mass fluid.

For women, save in the slight degree included in the country girl’s journey to town or city where cotton or woollen mills offer an opening for work, this course is impossible.  Ignorant, fearful, poor, and unprotected, the lions in her way are these very facts.  Added to this natural disqualification, comes another,—­in the lack of sympathy for her needs, and in the prejudice which hedges about all her movements.  In every trade she has sought to enter, men have barred the way.  In a speech made before the House of Commons in 1873, Henry Fawcett drew attention to the persistent resistance of men to any admission of women on the same terms with themselves.  He said:—­