ion between distant regions of the country.

In the advantages arising from this general growth of the labor
movement, both in its local activities and on its national side, women
workers have indeed shared. This is true, both on account of the
direct benefits accruing to them through joining mixed organizations,
or being aided by men to form separate organizations of their own,
and also through the vast assistance rendered by organized labor in
obtaining protective legislation for the most utterly helpless and
exploited toilers, for example, the child-labor laws which state after
state has placed upon the statute book, sanitary regulations, and laws
for the safeguarding of machinery dangerous to workers.

Still, compared with the extensive movement among men, in which the
women have been more or less a side issue, feminine trade unionism has
been but fitful in its manifestations, and far indeed from keeping
pace with the rate at which women have poured into the industrial
field. The youth of a large number of the girl workers, and the fact
that, as they grow up, so many of them pass out of the wage-earning
occupations, marriage, and the expectation of marriage, the main
obstacles that stand in the way today in getting women to organize and
to hold their unions together, furnish also the underlying causes of
the want of continuity of the trade-union movement among women since
it first began in the United States in the early part of the last
century. The too frequent change in the personnel of the members, and
therefore in the composition of the union itself, means an absence
of the permanence of spirit which is an essential condition for the
handing on in unbroken succession of standards of loyalty and esprit
de corps.

It is continuity that has rendered possible all human progress,
through the passing on from all of us to our successors, of each
small acquirement, of each elevation of standard. Where, but for
such continuity would be the college spirit, that descends upon and
baptizes the newcomer as he enters the college gates? Where, but for
continuity would be the constantly rising standards of morality and
social responsibility? Where, but for continuity would be national
life and all that makes patriotism worthy? Where, indeed, would be
humanity itself?

The average man is a wage-earner, and as such a fit subject for
organization. If extensive groups of men remain unorganized, the
responsibility lies partly o