to pay
more than one dollar a week to his girls. He would show the union his
books. Wasn't it better to have some job than none at all?

Down the wet street, now glinting blindingly in the late sun, we walked
into a grubby little tea shop for a sixpenny pot of tea between us. Out of
my pocket I pulled a wage list of well-paying, imagination-stirring jobs in
England. There were all sorts of jobs from toy-making at $8.25 a week to
glass-blowing at $20. On the face of the little girl as she told me that
she would meet me at the ministry of munitions the next morning there was a
look of worried indecision.

That night along Gloucester street, past the Georgian mansion houses built
before the union of Ireland and England--great, flat-faced, uprising
structures behind whose verdigrised knockers and shattered door fans comes
the murmur of tenements--I walked till I came to a much polished brass
plate lettered "St. Anthony's Working Girls' Home."

"Why don't you go to England?" was the first question the matron put to me
when I told her that I could get no factory work. "All the girls are
going."

In the stone-flagged cellar the girls were cooking their individual dinners
at a stove deep set in the stone wall. A big, curly-haired girl was holding
bread on a fork above the red coals.

"Last time I got lonesome," she was admitting. "But the best parlor maid
job here is $60 a year. And over at Basingstoke in England I've one waiting
for me at $150 a year. If you want to live nowadays I suppose you've gotta
be lonesome."

Next day at the alley of the employment bureau, I met the little girl of
the day before. She said a little dully:

"Well, I took--shirt-making--Edinburgh."

Instead of migrating, a girl may marry. But her husband in most cases can't
make enough money to support a family. To keep an average family of five,
just going, on food alone, costs $370 a year. Some farm hands get only
$100. An average unskilled worker obtains $260 a year. An organized
unskilled worker receives $367, and an organized skilled worker, $539.
Therefore, if a girl marries, she has not only to bear children but to go
out to work beside. Their constant toil makes the women of Ireland
something less than well-cared-for slaves.

Take the mother in Dublin. In Dublin there have long been too many casual
laborers. One-third of Dublin's population of 300,000 are in this class.
Now, while wages for some sorts of casual labor like dock work i