During my six weeks’ service as a saleswoman in the toy department of the Store Beautiful I had some business to attend to, and asked to get off. My request was granted none too graciously. When my pay-envelope came I found that I had been docked one dollar and seventy-three cents. That was all right; I expected to pay for the time spent on my own business. A week or so later the department was turned upside down, getting ready for the Christmas opening. Everybody came early and worked hard all day. When closing time came there was so much to be done that an appeal was made to the salespeople by the floor-walkers—they urged us to stay and help get our counters in order. I remained until nearly midnight, and not having time to go to my little tenement flat, I was forced to get what supper I could in a Third Avenue eating-place. It was not much of a supper, but it cost me eighty cents. Counting up my time I found that I had remained, helped in the department, just exactly the length of time I had taken off. Naturally I expected to receive at least as much for my time as the management had docked from my wages—my work was done at night and the time taken from them was in the morning, when salespeople are least busy. Seventy-five cents is what I received. Their time was worth one dollar and seventy-three cents, mine seventy-five cents. Now that, as I see it, is the crux of the fight between labor and capital to-day. Capital wants so much more for itself, its own time, than it is willing to give labor for its time. Labor is sick and tired of that arrangement. Next to the condition itself, the injustice of it, the chiefest reason for our social unrest to-day is Prohibition. So long as workers could stupefy their senses with liquor there was a chance of staving off the day of reckoning with capital indefinitely. Liquor not only robbed the worker of his mental power and his will to do, but it consumed his earnings and left him too poor to fight to a finish. Liquor caused more strikers to throw up the sponge than all other reasons put together. This is not an entirely original idea with me. I received the germ of the thought from one of four prostitutes at whose table I once ate my lunch. These young women were all Poles, immigrants who had come in soon after the end of the World War. They all spoke English sufficiently to be easily understood. If I could approach their accent I would try to give _verbatim_ a part of my conversation with them. Unhappily that is beyond my power. When I asked how they liked this country the prettiest of the four shook her head, the tallest one made a face, the shortest looked indifferent, and the stout one replied. She assured me that had they known that Prohibition would so soon become a law they would never have come to the United States. That was the reason they had left Russia. The Russians, most of them, had stopped drinking because they couldn’t get liquor.