or any virtue of honest living could grow, that makes the
army of women who have chosen degradation.

A woman, herself a worker, but large-brained and large-hearted beyond
the common endowment, wrote recently of the dangers put in the way of
the average shop or factory girl, imploring happy women living at ease
to adopt simpler forms, or at least to ask what form of living went on
below them. She wrote:--

"It may be urged that ignorant and inexperienced as these workers
are, they see only the bubbles and the froth, the superficial
glitter and exuberant overflow of passing styles and social
pleasures, and miss much, if not all, of the earnestness, the
virtue, the charity, and the refinement which may belong to those
they imitate, but with whom they seldom come in contact. This is
the very point and purpose of this paper, to remonstrate against
the injustice done to the women of wealth and leisure by their own
carelessness and indifference, and to urge them to come down to
those who cannot come up to them, to study them with as keen an
interest as they themselves are studied,--to know how that other
half lives."

"To know how that other half lives." That is the demand made upon woman
and man alike. Once at least put yourselves in the worker's place, if it
be but for half an hour, and think her thought and live her starved and
dreary life. Then ask what work must be done to alter conditions, to
kill false ideals, and vow that no day on earth shall pass that has not
held some effort, in word or deed, to make true living more possible for
every child of man. No mission, no guild, no sermon, has or can have
power alone. Only in the determined effort of the individual, in
individual understanding and renunciation forever of what has been
selfish and mean and base, can humanity know redemption and walk at last
side by side in that path where he who journeys alone finds no entrance,
nor can win it till self has dropped away, and knowledge come that
forever we are our brothers' keepers.

CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.

TWO HOSPITAL BEDS.

Why and how the money-getting spirit has become the ruler of American
life and thought no analyzer of social conditions has yet made plain.
That New York might be monopolist in this respect could well be
conceived, for the Dutch were traders by birthright and New Amsterdam
arose to this one end. But why the Puritan colony, whose fi