sacred right to work all night in factories on pain of dismissal. Such is the recent decision of the Court of Appeals. On the other hand the same Court has within a week held that the law is constitutional which restricts to eight hours the work of men employed by the State, the county or the city. I wish the women who think that ‘persuasion’ is all-sufficient might have our experience in New York City; we worked for twelve years to get inspectors who should look after the women and children in stores and mercantile establishments. At last an act was passed by which inspectors were to be appointed and for about a year and a half they really inspected and looked after the children and young girls in the stores. Then a great philanthropist, Nathan Straus, who was connected with an establishment employing many young people, got himself appointed, as he frankly said, in order to get the salaries of the inspectors stricken out of the budget and to get sterilized milk put into it. He got the salaries out and the sterilized milk in and then he resigned. The next year his successor got the sterilized milk out and there we were, back just where we had been at the beginning. We had to set to work again and labor for years longer, petitioning all the changing and kaleidoscopic officials who have to do with the finances of New York; and one mayor said frankly to us—to the Consumers’ League: “Ladies, why do you keep on coming? You know you will never get anything—there isn’t a voter among you!.... “Mrs. Kelley said the Consumers’ League had been investigating the condition of girls working in stores, away from home, and she gave a heartbreaking account of their destitution and semi-starvation. “Only nineteen States protect grown women at all,’ she said. “I am very tired of ‘persuasion’ and from this time on I mean to try other methods.”
Intense interest was manifested in the address entitled Noblesse Oblige by Miss Jean Gordon, factory inspector for New Orleans, in which she said in part:
One of the strongest and truest criticisms brought against our American leisure class is that they are absolutely devoid of a proper appreciation of what is conveyed in the expression, “Noblesse Oblige.” In no country in the world are there so many young women of education, wealth and leisure, free as the winds of heaven
