greater regard for their comfort, have done much to brighten what
was in the early part of the nineteenth century the dreariest life to
which any woman could be chained.

Along with the improvements in the condition of women's labor have
gone improvements in the housing of factory people. The industrial
evils that brought out such chivalrous champions of the poor as
the younger Lord Shaftesbury and his associates no longer generally
prevail in factory life. There yet remains much to be done for the
congregated women and girls of the factories. It was inevitable that
by the bringing of them together in great numbers, many from homes
of abject poverty where they had none of the benefits of careful
training, and by the herding of them together in factories where the
nature of their work did not furnish employment for their minds, the
moral tone of the young women of daily toil should have been lower
than that of their sister workers in other lines. But the dictum of
Lord Shaftesbury has been sinking into the social consciousness,
and has borne splendid fruit in the improvement of the conditions of
factory work for women. "In the male," says he, "the moral effects of
the system are very bad; but in the female they are infinitely worse,
not alone upon themselves, but upon their families, upon society, and,
I may add, upon the country itself. It is bad enough if you corrupt
the man; but if you corrupt the woman, you poison the waters of life
at the very fountain." In the first half of the nineteenth century,
the actual number of women employed in factories appears to have been
larger than that of men.

The existence of the factory, drawing out from the homes so many
women and making their home life only a secondary consideration and
an additional burden, presents one of the gravest problems of
modern times--a problem that must be approached harmoniously by the
philanthropists and the legislators if it is to be satisfactorily
solved. Habit begets contentment, so that it is not the employes of
the factory who feel most keenly the unfortunate circumstances of
their existence. It is the social reformer, whose one aim is not
the uplifting of the individual as such, but the betterment of the
individual as the unit of the social fabric, who is most concerned
for the betterment of the town life of England. As to the women
themselves, when they are compensated by extra wage they have no
complaint to make about the long hours; indee