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The loss of a finger, the maiming of a hand, even the mutilation of the poor girl who lost the use of both of her hands the occasional casualties for a few girls in the laundries are, though so much more salient, far less grave than the exhaustion and underpayment of the many. "This, then, is the situation in general for women workers in the commercial laundries.

My hope is that as the true value of the Trade Board comes to be better understood, its powers, far from being jealously curtailed, or confined to the suppression of the worst form of underpayment, will be extended to skilled employments, and organised industries, and be used not merely to fulfil the duty of the community to its humblest members, but to serve its still wider interest in the development of peaceful industrial co-operation.

The Boards have in general proceeded with moderation, but the more serious forms of underpayment have been suppressed so far as inspection has been adequately enforced.

The self-interest of the laborers is enlisted to prevent strikes, and a feeling of good will tends to prevail. Not a few employers are giving a degree of profit sharing as a mere business proposition; and the results have been generally successful. But the method is only a sop. It touches only one of the evils above mentioned, that of underpayment of workers.

He has to acknowledge that it has not solved the problems of unemployment, of underpayment, of overcrowding. He has to look deeper into the meaning of liberty and to take account of the bearing of actual conditions on the meaning of equality.

Advice that women should go back into the home was then as now the readiest cure for the evil, for even so early as this the men realized that the underpayment of women meant the underpayment of men, while the employment of women too often meant the dis-employment of men.

He suggested, however, a method, fundamentally analogous to that set forth in the text, of computing what labour, as such, does produce in reality. He gave his own opinion as to actual facts, as an impression merely; but how misleading impressions may be can be seen from his statements "that all very great fortunes, at all events, must be derived from the underpayment of labour."

They were shortly joined by some women of position, who saw in this spontaneous effort one promising remedy, at least for some of the gross evils of underpayment, overwork and humiliation suffered by the working-women and girls of New York, in common with those in every industrial center.