direct influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile
Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory
Department.

The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and
still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
conditions of working women in New York City.

The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two
large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They
confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated
overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.

The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of
the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting
vote.

The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it
placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of
seats,--one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of
children, except those holding working certificates from the
authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail
stores, as far as the law was obeyed.