ssociation, said:--

"It may be stated with great confidence that a prolific cause for
the rapid and extensive increase of insanity in this country is to
be found in the unceasing toil and anxiety to which the
working-classes are subjected, this cause developing the disease in
the existing generation, or, what is quite as frequently the case,
transmitting to the offspring idiocy, insanity, or some imperfectly
developed sensorium or nervous system. The agitated, overworked,
and harassed parent is not in a condition to transmit a healthy
brain to his child."[49]

Accepted as true in 1857, the words are not less so to-day, when cheap
labor swarms, and the unemployed number their millions.

How best to combine and to what ends, is the lesson taught in every
form of the new movement for organization among women. To learn how to
work together and what power lies in combination, has been the lesson of
all clubs. Among men it has counted as one of the chief educating
forces, but for women every circumstance has fostered the distrust of
each other which belongs to all undeveloped natures. For the lowest
order of worker even, the "Working-Woman's Journal," published in London
and the organ of the Working-Woman's Protective Union, has for the last
year recorded, from month to month, the gradual progress of the idea of
combination, and the new hope it has brought to all who have gone into
trades unions.

With us there has been equal need and equal ignorance of all that such
combinations have to give. They mean arbitration rather than strikes,
and the compelling of ignorant and unjust employers to consider the
situation from other points of view than their own. They compel also the
same attitude from men in the same trades, who often are as strong
opponents of a better chance for their associates among women workers
in the same branches, as the most prejudiced employer.

Six points are urged by the Working-Woman's Society of New York, all in
the lines indicated here. Its purposes and aims, as given in the
prospectus, are as follows:--

1. To encourage women in the various trades to protect their mutual
interests by organization.

2. To use all possible means to enforce the existing laws relating
to the protection of women and children in factories and shops,
investigating all reported violations of such laws; also to
promote, by all suitable means, fu