a notice of general reduction to thirty-five
cents a dozen was posted. There had been a union; it had won
a strike two years before--and then had been broken up by
shrewd employing of detectives who had got themselves elected
officers. With the union out of the way, there was no check
upon the bosses in their natural and lawful effort to get that
profit which is the most high god of our civilization. A few
of the youngest and most spirited girls--those from families
containing several workers--indignantly quit. A few others
murmured, but stayed on. The mass dumbly accepted the extra
twist in the screw of the mighty press that was slowly
squeezing them to death. Neither to them nor to Susan herself
did it happen to occur that she was the cause of the general
increase of hardship and misery. However, to have blamed her
would have been as foolish and as unjust as to blame any other
individual. The system ordained it all. Oppression and
oppressed were both equally its helpless instruments. No
wonder all the vast beneficent discoveries of science that
ought to have made the whole human race healthy, long-lived and
prosperous, are barely able to save the race from swift decay
and destruction under the ravages of this modern system of
labor worse than slavery--for under slavery the slave, being
property whose loss could not be made good without expense, was
protected in life and in health.

Susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning
power. She had been deceived by her swiftness in the first
days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her
down. Her first week's earnings were only four dollars and
thirty cents. This in her freshness, and in the busiest season
when wages were at the highest point.

In the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little
dingier--lived a man. Like herself he had no trade--that is,
none protected by a powerful union and by the still more
powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of
health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that
together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages
from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism. He
was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most
resourceful of men. He was insurance agent, toilet soap agent,
piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of
music on commission. He worked fourteen and sixteen hours a
day. He made nominally about twelv