birth against the diseases which come from
polluted water.

"Instead, then, of urging this as an additional reason for giving
us all decent water, he drew the remarkable conclusion that in the
interests of the public health, some new basis for the exclusion of
immigrants must be adopted. In this way," Miss Abbott adds, "most
discussions on the immigrant are diverted, and leave the fundamental
problems quite untouched. For whether we adopt a literary and physique
test, increase the head-tax, and do all the other things suggested by
the restrictionists, thousands of immigrants will continue to come to
us every year."

Apart from general considerations, these gigantic industrial
upheavals have afforded to the public-spirited citizen an unsurpassed
opportunity of understanding and appreciating the industrial problem
as it affects and is affected by the immigrant girl and young woman. A
few of us, here and there, from personal and trade experience knew the
facts years ago as well as they are generally known today. But not
all the Government reports, not an army of investigators could have
imparted this knowledge to the public, and impressed upon them the
sordid suffering of the working and living conditions of the foreign
woman in the sewing trades in any great American city.

For in strikes of such magnitude, where whole groups of the
participators themselves lived for months in a white heat of idealism
and enthusiasm, life-stories are no longer dragged out of shy retiring
girls, but are poured out in a burning flood by those very same girls,
now quite transformed by the revolution through which they have
passed, and by the new ideas of liberty and sisterhood with which they
are possessed.

I speak of the woman worker here, because it is she who is my concern
at present, and in all the now historic strikes she has played a very
large part. Indeed in the first of these risings, in the shirtwaist
strikes of 1909-1910 in New York and Philadelphia, very few men
workers were involved, and in the huge Chicago strike, 1910-1911,
among the makers of men's ready-made clothing, although there the girl
strikers numbered only about one-fourth of the whole, even that fourth
made up the very respectable total of, it is believed, somewhere
around 10,000 individuals, the population of a small city. Indeed it
would give most Americans pause to be told that in this same Chicago
strike the whole of the workers, men and women together, nu