od over in Brooklyn, or in Woodlawn up in Westchester County. In
other words, any story, to absorb their interest, must cater to the very
primitive feminine liking for identity. This liking, this passion, their
own special authors have thoroughly comprehended, and keep it constantly
in mind in the development of their plots.

This taste for better literature could be helped along immeasurably if
still another original-minded philanthropist were to make it his
business that no tenement baby should be without its "Mother Goose" and,
a little later, its "Little Women," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Robinson
Crusoe," and all the other precious childhood favorites. As it is, the
majority know nothing about them.

But, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the
working girl as a wage-earning unit--the most potent force for the
adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for
the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral--will be the
attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate
consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs
to be righted.

At the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself
and her condition as the working woman herself. Taking everything into
consideration, and in spite of conditions which, to the observer viewing
them at a distance great enough to get a perspective, seem
irreconcilably harsh and bitter--in the face of all this, one must
characterize the working woman as a contented, if not a happy woman.
That is the great trouble that will have to be faced in any effort to
alleviate her condition. She is too contented, too happy, too patient.
But not wholesomely so. Hers is a contentment, a happiness, a patience
founded, not in normal good health and the joy of living and working,
but in apathy. Her lot is hard, but she has grown used to it; for, being
a woman, she is patient and long-suffering. She does not entirely
realize the tragedy of it all, and what it means to herself, or to her
children perhaps yet to be born.

In the happy future, the working girl will no longer be content to be
merely "worked." Then she will have learned to work. She will have
learned to work intelligently, and, working thus, she will begin to
think--to think about herself and all those things which most vitally
concern her as a woman and as a wage-earner. And then, you may depend
upon it, she will settle the question