ction, keep up their wages in spite of the invasion of
their domain by new and improved machinery. On the other hand,
the garment-workers, the sweaters' victims, poor, unorganized,
unintelligent, despised, remain forever on the verge of
pauperism, irrespective of their endless toil. If, now, by some
untoward fate the printers should suddenly find themselves
disfranchised, placed in a position in which their members were
politically inferior to the members of other trades, no effort of
their own short of complete enfranchisement could restore to them
that prestige, that good standing in the esteem of their
fellow-craftsmen and the public at large which they now enjoy,
and which contributes materially in support of their demand for
high wages.

In the garment trades, on the other hand, the presence of a body
of the disfranchised, of the weak and young, undoubtedly
contributes to the economic weakness of these trades. Custom,
habit, tradition, the regard of the public, both employing and
employed, for the people who do certain kinds of labor,
contribute to determine the price of that labor, and no
disfranchised class of workers can permanently hold its own in
competition with enfranchised rivals. But this works both ways.
It is fatal for any body of workers to have forever hanging from
the fringes of its skirts other bodies on a level just below its
own; for that means continual pressure downward, additional
difficulty to be overcome in the struggle to maintain reasonable
rates of wages. Hence, within the space of two generations there
has been a complete revolution in the attitude of the
trades-unions toward the women working in their trades. Whereas
forty years ago women might have knocked in vain at the doors of
the most enlightened trade-union, to-day the Federation of Labor
keeps in the field paid organizers whose duty it is to enlist in
the unions as many women as possible. The workingmen have
perceived that women are in the field of industry to stay; and
they see, too, that there can not be two standards of work and
wages for any trade without constant menace to the higher
standard. Hence their effort to place the women upon the same
industrial level with themselves in order that all may pull
together in the effort to maintain reason