The mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic with pain in the shoulders and back before nine in the morning, and to watch the clock creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that has stood near one all day long.  Yet it is not until the system has become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one can judge without bias.  When I had grown so accustomed to the work that I was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when I had become so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer noticed it; when any bed seemed good enough for the healthy sleep of a working girl, and any food good enough to satisfy a hungry stomach, then and then only I began to see that in the great unknown class there were a multitude of classes which, aside from the ugliness of their esthetic surroundings and the intellectual inactivity which the nature of their occupation imposes, are not all to be pitied:  they are a collection of human individuals with like capacities to our own.  The surroundings into which they are born furnish little chance for them to develop their minds and their tastes, but their souls suffer nothing from working in squalour and sordidness.  Certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested kindness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude shone out in the poverty-stricken wretches I met on my way, as the sun shines glorious in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize some rich man’s fields.

My observations were confined chiefly to the women.  Two things, however, regarding the men I noticed as fixed rules.  They were all breadwinners; they worked because they needed the money to live; they supported entirely the woman, wife or mother, of the household who did not work.  In many cases they contributed to the support of even the wage-earning females of the family:  the woman who does not work when she does not need to work is provided for.

The women were divided into two general classes:  Those who worked because they needed to earn their living, and those who came to the factories to be more independent than at home, to exercise their coquetry and amuse themselves, to make pin money for luxuries.  The men formed a united class.  They had a purpose in common.  The women were in a class with boys and with children.  They had nothing in common but their physical inferiority to man.  The children were working from necessity, the boys were working from necessity; the only industrial unit complicating the problem were the girls who worked without being obliged to—­the girls who had “all the money they needed, but not all the money they wanted.”  To them the question of wages was not vital.  They could afford to accept what the breadwinner found insufficient.  They were better fed, better equipped than the self-supporting hand; they were independent about staying away from the factory when they were tired or ill, and they alone determined the reputation for irregularity in which the breadwinners were included.