XII. REMEDIES AND SUGGESTIONS 249

APPENDIX.

FACTORY INSPECTION LAW 275

AUTHORITIES CONSULTED IN PREPARING THIS BOOK 291

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WOMAN'S LABOR AND OF THE WOMAN QUESTION 294

INDEX 305

WOMEN WAGE-EARNERS;

THEIR PAST, THEIR PRESENT, AND THEIR FUTURE.

INTRODUCTION

The one great question that to-day agitates the whole civilized world is
an economic question. It is not the production but the distribution of
wealth; in other words, the wages question,--the wages of men and women.
Nowhere do we find any suggestion that capital and the landlord do not
receive a _quid pro quo_. Instead, the whole labor world cries out that
the capitalist and the landlord are enslaving the rest of the world, and
absorbing the lion's share of the joint production.

So long as it is a question of production only, there is perfect
harmony. Both unite in agreeing that to produce as much as possible is
for the interest of each. The conflict begins with distribution. It is
no longer a war of one nation with another; it is internecine war,
destroying the foundations of our own defences, and making enemies of
those who should be brothers.

It is impossible for even the most dispassionate or indifferent observer
to blink these facts. Proclaim as we may that there is no antagonism
between capital and labor,--that their interests are one, and that
conditions and opportunities for the worker are always better and
better,--practical thinkers and workers deny this conclusion. Wealth has
enormously increased, in a far greater ratio than population. Does the
laborer receive his due proportion of this increase? One must
unhesitatingly answer no. In a country whose life began in the search
for freedom, and which professes to give equal opportunity to all, more
startling inequality exists than in any other in the civilized world.
One of our ablest lawyers, Thomas G. Shearman, has lately written:--

"Our old equality is gone. So far from being the most equal people
on the face of the earth, as we once boasted that we were, ours is
now the most unequal of civilized nations. We talk about the wealth
of the British aristocracy and about the poverty of the British
poor. There is not in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland so