xpression of the
ideals, the wishes and the needs of the wage-earning girl.

As for the woman of wealth, I should be the last to question her right
to opportunities for self-development, or to deny her the joy of
assisting her sorely driven sisters to rise out of the industrial
mire, and stand erect in self-reliant independence. But if the League
is to grow until it becomes the universal expression of the woman's
part in organized labor, then the privilege of assisting with
financial help the ordinary activities of the League can be hers only
during the infancy of the body. No organization can draw its nurture
permanently from sources outside of itself, although many a movement
has been nursed through its early stages of uncertainty and struggle
by the aid of the sympathetic and understanding outsider.

V

THE HUGE STRIKES

In September, 1909, the name of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company,
which has since become a word of such ill omen, was known to few
outside the trade. The factory had not then been wrapped in the flames
and smoke of the Asch fire, that was to cut short the lives of one
hundred and forty-three workers, and to blight the existence and mar
the happiness of many more.

But by a not altogether inexplicable coincidence, it had been among
the employes of this very firm that the smoldering flames of human
discontent broke out, that were to grow into the "Strike of the Forty
Thousand," a strike that proved to be but the first of a long series
of revolts among the foreign garment-workers of the largest cities in
the East and the Middle West.

It is true that in such an extensive trade as that of making
ready-made clothes, with its low wages and its speeding-up, its
sweating and its uncertainty of employment, there is always a strike
on somewhere. At that very time, there were in progress two strikes of
quite respectable size: one in Boston, under the Ladies' Tailors'
and Dressmakers' Union, and the other in St. Louis, where the
long-drawn-out Marx and Haas strike involving the makers of men's
ready-made clothing, was in its first stage.

But outside of labor circles, these strikes were attracting no
particular attention. The public were not even aware of what was
happening, and would have been entirely indifferent if they had known.

The turning out of ladies' ready-made waists is an immense business in
New York. The trade, like other branches of garment-making, is largely
in the hands of Jew