er meaning
good wages, steady work and some chance of bettering conditions. But
with the great mass of workers, the wages had, from many causes, fallen
below the point of subsistence, or kept so near it that advance was
impossible, and the worker, even when fairly well trained, faced a
practically hopeless future.

The search began with a bias against rather than for the worker, and the
determination to do strictest justice to employer as well as employed.
Long experience had taught what was to be expected from untrained,
unskilled laborers, with no ambition or power to rise. Approaching the
subject with the conviction that most of the evil admitted to exist must
be the result of the worker's own defective training and inability to
make the best and most of the wages received, it very soon became plain
that, while this remained true, deeper causes were at work, and that
unseen forces must be weighed and measured before just judgment could be
possible. No denunciation of grasping employers answered the question
why they grasped, and why men who in private relations showed warm
hearts and the tenderest care for those nearest them became on the
instant, when faced by this problem of labor, deaf and blind to the
sorrow and struggle before them.

That the system was full of evils was freely admitted whenever facts
were brought home and attention compelled. But the easy-going American
temperament is certain that the wrong of to-day will easily become
righted by to-morrow, and is profoundly sceptical as to the existence of
any evil of which this is not true.

"It's pretty bad, yes, I know it's pretty bad," said one large employer
of women, and his word was the word of many others. "But we're not to
blame. I don't want to grind 'em down. It's the system that's wrong, and
we are its victims. Competition gets worse and worse. Machinery is too
much for humanity. I've been certain of that for a good while, and so,
of course, these hands have to take the consequences."

Nothing better indicates the present status of the worker than this very
phrase "hands." Not heads with brains that can think and plan, nor souls
born to grow into fulness of life, but hands only; hands that can hold
needle or grasp tool, or follow the order of the brain to which they are
bond-servants, each pulse moving to the throb of the great engine which
drives all together, but never guided by any will of brain or joy of
soul in the task of the day. There h