“We can help evolution by the aid of its own highest and latest product,—­science.  When all the teaching of medical and social science lead us to look upon the absence of the mother from the home as the cause of the gravest possible evils, can we be warranted in standing passively by, allowing this evil to work itself out to the bitter end, by the process of natural selection?  Something might perhaps be said in favor of the present apathetic mode of viewing this question, if natural selection were really securing the survival of the fittest, so that only the weakly babes were killed off, and the strong ones well brought up.  But it is much to be feared that no infants ever really recover from the test of virtual starvation to which they are so ruthlessly exposed.  The vital powers are irreparably crippled, and the infant grows up a stunted, miserable specimen of humanity, the prey to every physical and moral evil."[46]

It is hardly necessary to go on specifying special violations of sanitary law or special illustrative cases.  The Report of the New York Bureau of Labor for 1885 is a magazine of such cases,—­a summary of all the horrors that the worst conditions can include.  Aside from the revolting pictures of the life lived from day to day by the workers themselves, it gives in detail case after case of rapacity and over-reaching on the part of the employers; and parallel ones may be found in every labor report which has touched upon the subject.

In New York a “Working Woman’s Protective Union,” formed more than twenty-five years ago, has done unceasing work in settling disputed claims and collecting wages unjustly withheld.  No case is entered on their books which has not been examined by their lawyer, and thus only well grounded complaints find record; but with even these precautions the records show nearly fifty thousand adjudicated since they began work.  Many cities have special committees, in the organized charities, who seek to cover the same ground, but who find it impossible to do all that is required.  From East and West alike, complaints are practically the same.  It is not only women in trades, but those in domestic service, who are recorded as suffering every form of oppression and injustice.  Colorado and California, Kansas and Wisconsin, speak the same word.  With varying industries wrongs vary, but the general summary is the same.

The system of fines, while on general principles often just, has been used by unscrupulous employers to such a degree as to bring the week’s wages down a third or even half.  It is impossible to give illustrative instances in detail; but all who deal with girls, in clubs and elsewhere, report that the system requires modification.

On the side of the employers, and as bearing also on the evils which are most marked among women workers, we may quote from the Government Report, “Working Women in Large Cities":—­