situation, all but seven members of the society were asking for help from the union. Someone reported the meeting to the firm, and the next day, Friday, September 24, the employers called the girls together and expostulated with them more in sorrow than in anger. Terms were once more arranged between a delegation of operators and the firm, and the next day everyone went back to work as usual. On Monday, however, when the girls reported for work the shop was found closed, and that night the East Side papers reported that the Triangle Waist Company had shut down for an indefinite time. The next, however, came the notice that at "the earnest solicitation of the members of the society," it was once more open. No union girls were taken back, so within thirty-six hours, through the agency of the society whose dwindling membership then numbered exactly sevenall of them sisters, cousins and aunts of the members of the firm the strike became a lockout.

This was the situation with the Triangle company on the first of October. Meanwhile there was a local strike on at Leiserson's and the trade at large, seething with discontent, needed no further encouragement to go out en masse. Probably the only consideration that had held them in check before was the fear on the part of the Jewish girls-the larger part of the trade-that the Italians would "scab." Employers had made clever use of the race and religious antagonism to keep the girls from uniting.

The resolution for a general strike was taken at mass meetings held November 22. At Cooper Union Mr. Gompers spoke, and a procession of speakers, mostly Yiddish, for two hours implored their attentive audience to go about the thing soberly and with due consideration; but, if they decided to strike, to stand by their colors and be loyal to the union. The dramatic climax of the evening was reached when Clara Lemlich, a striker from Leiserson's who had been assaulted when picketing, made her way to the platform, begged a moment from the chairman, and after an impromptu Philippic in Yiddish, eloquent even to American ears, put the motion

for a general strike and

was unanimously endorsed.

The

chairman then cried, "Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?" And up came 2,000 right hands with the prayer: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off at the wrist from the arm I now raise."

Several weeks before this eventful night, the arresting of pickets had begun, and members of the Women's Trade Union League had begun to take a hand. Picketing as practiced by these strikers consists in sentry duty performed by union members before the doors of a shop at opening and closing hours, telling the “scabs" that a strike is on-among the newly arrived foreigners there are many who do not know this—and asking them to come to union headquarters and learn about it. When peaceably practiced, picketing has for years been upheld by the New York courts as legal. The girls, however, have been arrested literally by the dozen, taken to court and fined sometimes as high as $10 each, without even a hearing.

There has been considerable difference in the way various members of the bench have handled the cases. Detective and neighborhood thugs have threatened the pickets steadily, by profanity and even by blows which the police have somehow failed to see, while no smallest gesticulation of a picket has escaped their notice or failed to be construed as an assault. For weeks the girls have endured what they believed to be injustice at the hands of the officers of law and order, and if at times recently they have become aggressive, it is hardly to be wondered at. One member of the Women's Trade Union League who with three other witnesses saw a scab assault a picket, applied to a magistrate for a warrant for the girl's arrest. She reports receiving this astonishing response from the bench: "You have no right to picket; you have no right to be on Washington place. Every time you go down there you will get what is coming to you and I shall not interfere. No, I'll give you no warrant."

The girls are showing an unusual pluck and unity of spirit. It is a unique spectacle anywhere to see Jews, Italians and

Americans working shoulder to shoulder for a common cause. The management at headquarters is excellent. Mr. Baroff with an office and clerical force adapted to a membership of 500 has handled the affairs of 30,000.

Headquarters have been opened for the Italians and Americans gather at the Women's Trade Uunion League. Strike benefits are paid only to those who ask for them. A few of the strikers are married women; a small number are men, but the overwhelming majority are girls under twenty-five. All fines are being paid by the union. On the evening of December 4 alone, these amounted to $137, representing twentysix arrests for technical assaults and twenty-three fines.

The most spectacular features of the whole event have been the visit of several thousand workers to the mayor to ask for fair play from the police, and Mrs. Belmont's woman suffrage meeting in the Hippodrome on December 5. When called upon by the delegation the mayor promised fair play but when invited by Mrs. Belmont two days later to attend her meeting, he stated his inability to be present and his lack of interest.

These are the demands in which the mayor has no interest: (1) A fifty-two hour week and not more than two hour's overtime on any one day. (The law allows sixty hours a week and not more than three days a week overtime.)

(2) The closed shop (i. e, no non-union labor employed). (3) Notice of slack work in advance, if possible, or at least promptly on arrival in the morning.

(4) In slack season to keep all hands on part time rather than a few operators on full time, so far as possible.

(5) All wages to be paid directly by the firm (i. e., the abolition of the sub-contractor system).

(6) A wage scale to be adjusted individually for each shop, but the terms to be determined definitely in advance for all forms of work.

The strikers' demands throw much light on conditions that have previously prevailed in the shops. At the Triangle shop, for instance, in rush seasons the girls worked until eight or

nine o'clock at night with no time off for supper; while in slack season not infrequently a girl reported for work at the usual time and sat idle all the morning, to be told at noon that she was not needed.

It is impossible to say how much longer the strike will last and on just what terms it will end. Already the New England cotton mills are feeling the dearth of orders from the city in whose shops and factories one-half the ready made clothing of the country is made. So rapidly are the manufacturers giving in, however, that it is difficult to believe the girls will not win the majority odds in the end. It is safe to prophesy that if they arbitrate they may compromise on every other point, but not on the main most vital issue of the whole struggle-the closed shop.

It is easy to say that the closed shop demand is an unjust one, but in a sweated industry where a union exists it is the best defense of the manufacturer as well as of the worker. If our shirtwaists are going to be made on fair terms, either the profit to the manufacturer must be reduced, or prices must go up. So long as there are manufacturers in the trade who employ sweated labor, they can always underbid union shops. On the other hand, employers with the best intentions, who use both scab and union labor, will in a rush season make demands to which union members cannot accede and thus by degrees they must be driven out of the mixed shop.

But through and about all this discussion of union and scab labor, looms a larger even more important problemthat of the constitutional right of free speech. The conduct of the police officers and magistrates in their seeming conspiracy of curtailing the liberty of American citizens, is one that must attract the attention of even those who are not interested in industrial disputes.

There should be at least some small degree of unanimity between the judiciary and the Police Department. If the police commissioner states that the opportunity is given the pickets to do their work in a legal and orderly way at the same

time that a magistrate says they have no "right" to picket, it is impossible for the strikers or for their supporters to know what is expected of them.

Probably public sympathy has been more stirred by the unfair treatment of women pickets than the cause of the strikers could ever of itself have aroused, so the martyrdom of the girls who have been abused, thumped and thrown into the gutter has not been in vain.

Survey. 24: 60-4. April 2, 1910.

Telephone Girl. Graham Taylor.

The telephone girl is getting some share of public attention of recent years, and properly so. Besides magazine articles containing more or less original matter, the public have three official sources of very complete information on the subject.

First, the report of the Royal Commission of Canada on the strike of telephone operators in Toronto; secondly, the report of the Wisconsin Railroad Commission on complaints made by citizens of Milwaukee against the alleged inefficient service of the telephone company; last, the report of Commissioner Charles P. Neill of the Bureau of Labor, made to the United States Senate.

Each one of these reports goes into considerable detail as to the actual work of the telephone girl. The Canadian commission had to do with a single city at the time of a strike, and the Wisconsin report is confined to conditions in Milwaukee and was directed to a special grievance. The report

of the Bureau of Labor has the advantage of covering a wide scope and dealing with the whole question rather than a special phase of it. In his letter of transmittal, Commissioner Neill states that the planning and conduct of the investigation in the field, and the writing of the text of the report were intrusted to Ethelbert Stewart, the tabulating of the statistics having been done by Dr. C. E. Baldwin.