fingers upon the right
hand, or a broken wrist, may disqualify an operator from continuing in
the only work in which she is skilled and make her struggle for
respectability even more difficult. Varicose veins and broken arches in
the feet are found in every occupation in which women are obliged to
stand for hours, but at any moment either one may develop beyond purely
painful symptoms into crippling incapacity. One such girl recently
returning home after a long day's work deliberately sat down upon the
floor of a crowded street car, explaining defiantly to the conductor and
the bewildered passengers that "her feet would not hold out another
minute." A young woman who only last summer broke her hand in a mangle
was found in a rescue home in January, explaining her recent experience
by the phrase that she was "up against it when leaving the hospital in
October."

In spite of many such heart-breaking instances the movement for
safeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidents
proceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of a
miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate of
industrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, its
hideousness might well have been increased had it been able to
demonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and the
complete moral disaster which overtook their victims.

Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime
often find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all
their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said
that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly
discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save
enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a
week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week
for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly
wage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes
twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she
possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle;
to use her own contemptuous phrase, she "sold out for a pair of shoes."

Usually the phrases are less graphic, but after all they contain the
same dreary meaning: "Couldn't make both ends meet," "I had always been
used to having nice things," "Couldn't make enough money to live