“Well, I guess I would!” she said confidently.  “I ain’t read all my life sense I was eight years old not to know good writin’ from bad.  Can you-all sing?”

“No.”

“Play sweet music?”

“No.”

“I jest love it.”  She enthuses.  “Every Saturday afternoon I take of a music teacher on the gee-tar.  It costs me a quarter.”

I could see the scene:  a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the eagerness—­all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the slaves of toil.

“They ain’t much flowers here in Granton,” she said again. “’Tain’t no use to try to have even a few geraneums; it’s so dry; ain’t no yards nor gardens, nuther.”

Musing on this desolation as she walks up and down the line, she says:  “I dew love flowers, don’t you?”

* * * * *

Over and over again I am asked by those whose wish I suppose is to prove to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to respond: 

“The working people are happy?  The factory girls are happy, are they not?  Don’t you find them so?”

Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, is happy?

Do you wish her to be so?  Is the existence ideal?

I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of Lynn and for the
Southern mill-hand.

I thank Heaven that I can say truthfully, that of all who came under my observation, not one who was of age to reflect was happy.  I repeat, the working-woman is brave and courageous, but the most sane and hopeful indication for the future of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time stretch toward it.  They have no time to think, even if they knew how.  All that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find under their hand.  We have never realized, they have never known, that their great need—­given the work that is wrung from them and the degradation in which they are forced to live—­is a craving for amusement and relaxation.  Amusements for this class are not provided; they can laugh, they rarely do.  The thing that they seek—­let me repeat:  I cannot repeat it too often—­in the minimum of time that remains to them, is distraction.  They do not want to read; they do not want to study; they are too tired to concentrate.  How can you expect it?  I heard a manufacturer say:  “We gave our mill-hands everything that we could to elevate