Then turning, he took his wife in his arms and said, “Millie darling, we shall never be without a home again.  Please God it shall be here until we find the better home of Heaven.”

APPENDIX

Christian men and women of New York, you—­not the shopkeepers—­are chiefly to blame for the barbarous practice of compelling women, often but growing girls, to stand from morning until evening, and often till late in the night.  The supreme motive of the majority of the men who enforce this inhuman regulation is to make money.  Some are kind-hearted enough to be very willing that their saleswomen should sit down if their customers would tolerate the practice, and others are so humane that they grant the privilege without saying, By your leave, to their patrons.

There is no doubt where the main responsibility should be placed in this case.

Were even the intoxicated drayman in charge of a shop, when sober he would have sufficient sense not to take a course that would drive from him the patronage of the “best and wealthiest people in town.”  Upon no class could public opinion make itself felt more completely and quickly than upon retail merchants.  If the people had the humanity to say, We will not buy a dime’s worth at establishments that insist upon a course at once so unnatural and cruel, the evil would be remedied speedily.  Employers declare that they maintain the regulation because so many of their patrons require that the saleswoman shall always be standing and ready to receive them.  It is difficult to accept this statement, but the truth that the shops wherein the rule of standing is most rigorously enforced are as well patronized as others is scarcely a less serious indictment, and it is also a depressing proof of the strange apathy on the question.

No labored logic is needed to prove the inherent barbarity of the practice.  Let any man or woman—­even the strongest—­try to stand as long as these frail, underfed girls are required to be upon their feet, and he or she will have a demonstration that can never be forgotten.  In addition, consider the almost continual strain on the mind in explaining about the goods and in recommending them, in making out tickets of purchase correctly while knowing that any errors will be charged against their slender earnings, or more than made good by fines.  What is worse, the organs of speech are in almost constant exercise, and all this in the midst of more or less confusion.  The clergyman, the lecturer, is exhausted after an hour of speech.  Why are not their thunders directed against the inhumanity of compelling women to spend ten or twelve hours of speech upon their feet?  The brutal drayman was arrested because he was inflicting pain on a sentient being.  Is not a woman a sentient being? and is any one so ignorant of physiology as not to have some comprehension of the evils which must result in most cases from compelling women—­often too young to be mature—­to stand, under the trying circumstances that have been described?