No, to each count.  For the people at the bottom of the ladder—­for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter—­St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents.  A town whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country.  A town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living.

The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year.  In St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady—­and rents are higher than in New York City.

It must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of shoe-workers earn, less than $440, for full-time work.  The same is true of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department stores.

Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.

The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be.  Men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes.

Business opportunity has depended much on pliable state and municipal laws.  How the interests fought to keep them pliable; how St. Louis and Missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all know.

We know, too, the period of political reform.  People thought the killing trouble in Missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the optimists’ faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and referendum as panacea, was white and shining. They did not see that the underlying problem is industrial.

After the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of beating the game.  The only essential difference is that their methods to-day are less raw and crude.  They play a more gentlemanly game; but the people are still robbed of their rights.

Thus it came to pass that when the cheerful optimist went to the cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare.

Meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own account, not singly but in groups and packs.  As yet, although a deal of snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has lacked great organizers in St. Louis.

It has remained for the working women of St. Louis to make the industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to bend the political bow for their protection.