A new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women to secure justice through the ballot-box?

How have St. Louis women attained this clear vision that their industrial future is bound up in politics?  It is a three years’ story.  Let us go back a little.

St. Louis is essentially a conservative city.  First, it was an old French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman’s town.  With such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative.  In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war between the states.  She lost her market.  This made her slow.

In the ’eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover from the ruin of her Southern trade.  Little by little she took heart, for the great Southwest was being settled.  There was a new field in which to build up trade.  To-day St. Louis is the great wholesale and jobbing depot, the manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the Southwest.

Since 1890, great fortunes have been amassed—­most of them, indeed, in the past ten years.  There has been a rapid growth of industry.  The old Southern city has become a soft-coal factory center.  A pall of smoke hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound.  In the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer, carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of traveling salesmen in the Southwest territory—­and in the South, too, for St. Louis is winning back some of her old-time trade.

And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools.  The men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks.  “Yes, St. Louis is a grand old business town.  Solid!  No mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth.  New plants starting every month and the old ones growing.  Then, when we get our deep waterway, that’s going to be another big shove toward prosperity.

“Nice town to live in, too!  Look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings.  Never was anything like our World’s Fair in the history of men—­never!  Look at our parks, too.  When we get ’em linked together with speedways, where’ll you find anything prettier?” Thus the money-makers in this heavy German town.

But what about the employees—­the clerks and the factory workers?  Have they been “in” on this “big shove toward prosperity?” Have they found it a “nice” town to live in?