whom I saw eating in the breakfast-room at the Midland the day before. Think of the poor little girls and boys, principally girls, clattering to and from work in their wooden shoes and, if you will believe it (I saw it at Boulton on a cold, rainy, January day), in thin black shawls and white straw hats, much darkened by continuous wear. One crowd that I observed was pouring out at high noon. I heard a whistle yelling its information, and then a mouse-hole of a door in one corner of the great structure opened, and released the black stream of mill-workers. By comparison, it looked like a small procession of ants or a trickle of black water. Small as it was, however, it soon filled the street. The air was wet, smoky, gray, the windows even at this midday hour gleaming here and there with lights. The factory hands were a dreary mass in the rain, some of them carrying umbrellas, many without them, all the women wearing straw hats and black shawls! I looked at their faces--pale, waxy, dull, inefficient. I looked at their shapeless skirts hanging like bags about their feet. I looked at their flat chests, their graceless hands, and then I thought of the strong men who know how to use--I hesitate to say exploit--inefficiency. What would these women do if they could not work in the mills? One thing I am sure of: the mills, whatever charges may be brought against their owners in regard to hours, insufficiency of payment, indifference of treatment, are nevertheless better places in which to spend one’s working hours than the cottages with their commonplace round of duties. What can one learn washing dishes and scrubbing floors in a cottage? I can see some one jumping up to exclaim: “What can one learn tying commonplace threads in a cotton mill, taking care of eight or nine machines--one lone woman? What has she time to learn?” This--if you ask me; the single thought of organization, if nothing more. The thought that there is such a thing as a great machine which can do the work of fifty or a hundred men. It will not do to say the average individual can learn this method working in a home. It is not true. What the race needs is ideas. It needs thoughts of life and injustice and justice and opportunity or the lack of it kicked into its senseless clay. It needs to be made to think by some rough process or other (gentleness won’t do it), and this is one way. I like labor-leaders. I like big, raw, crude, hungry men who are eager for gain--for self-glorification. I like to see them plotting to force such men as I saw breakfasting at the Midland to give them something--and the people beneath them. I am glad to think that the clay whose womankind wears black shawls and straw hats in January has sense enough at last to appoint these raw, angry fellows, who scheme and struggle and fight and show their teeth and call great bitter strikes, such as I saw here, and such as had shut tight so many of these huge solemn mills. It speaks much for the race. It speaks much