laws. One reason,
probably, why the freeing of the negro slave has been so often merely
a nominal freeing is because he was able to play so small a part
himself in the gaining of his freedom. It was a gift, truly, from the
master race. But no one, surely, would use that argument in reference
to children, and an immense proportion of the department-store
employes are but children, children between fourteen and eighteen,
and in some states much younger. One hears of occasional instances
in which even children have banded together and gone on strike.
School-children have done it. The little button-sewers of Muscatine,
Iowa, formed a juvenile union during the long strike of 1911. But
these are such exceptional instances that they can hardly count in
normal times. And that such a large body of children and very young
girls are included among department-store employes adds immensely to
the difficulty of gaining over the grown-up women to organization.

[Illustration: A BINDERY

Hand folders on platform. Machine folder and hand gatherers below.]

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ONE OF THE LARGEST AND BEST EQUIPPED WAIST
AND CLOAK FACTORIES IN NEW YORK CITY]

Perhaps at some future time children may mature mentally earlier. If
along with this, education is more efficient, and the civic duty of a
common responsibility for the good of all is taught universally in our
schools, even the child at fourteen may become class-conscious, and
willing to fight and struggle for a common aim. But if that day
ever comes, it will be in the far future, and let us hope that then
childish energies may be free to find other channels of expression and
childish cooeperation be exerted for happier aims. The child of today
is often temporarily willful and disobedient, but on the whole he (and
more often she) is pathetically patient and long-suffering under all
sorts of hardships and injustices, and has no idea of anything like an
industrial rebellion. Indeed overwork and ill-usage have upon children
the markedly demoralizing effect of cowing them permanently, so that
in oppressing a child you do more than deprive him of his childhood,
you weaken what ought to be the backbone of his maturity. But improve
conditions, whether by law or otherwise, and you will have a more
independent "spunky" child, a better prospect of having him, when
grown up, a more wholesomely natural rebel. Indeed more or less, this
applies to human beings of any age.

As regard