bolished, better wages paid; the
Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
founded by H.P. Blavatsky.

[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]

The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what
the way of rescue for the world?"

In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a
piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the
atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
opened such a home.

Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
by all public bodies; work for the doc