“Hands,” he addressed us, fingering the gold watch-chain that spread across his fat belly, “it’s slack in the other trades and I can get plenty girls begging themselves to work for half what you’re getting--only I ain’t a skinner. I always give my hands a show to earn their bread. From now on, I’ll give you fifty cents a dozen shirts instead of seventy-five, but I’ll give you night-work, so you needn’t lose nothing.” And he was gone. The stillness of death filled the shop. Each one felt the heart of the other bleed with her own helplessness. A sudden sound broke the silence. A woman sobbed chokingly. It was Balah Rifkin, a widow with three children. “Oi weh!” She tore at her scrawny neck. “The blood-sucker--the thief! How will I give them to eat--my babies--my babies--my hungry little lambs!” “Why do we let him choke us?” “Twenty-five cents less on a dozen--how will we be able to live?” “He tears the last skin from our bones!” “Why didn’t nobody speak up to him?” “Tell him he couldn’t crush us down to worse than we had in Russia?” “Can we help ourselves? Our life lies in his hands.” Something in me forced me forward. Rage at the bitter greed tore me. Our desperate helplessness drove me to strength. “I’ll go to the boss!” I cried, my nerves quivering with fierce excitement. “I’ll tell him Balah Rifkin has three hungry mouths to feed.” Pale, hungry faces thrust themselves toward me, thin, knotted hands reached out, starved bodies pressed close about me. “Long years on you!” cried Balah Rifkin, drying her eyes with a corner of her shawl. “Tell him about my old father and me, his only bread-giver,” came from Bessie Sopolsky, a gaunt-faced girl with a hacking cough. “And I got no father or mother and four of them younger than me hanging on my neck.” Jennie Feist’s beautiful young face was already scarred with the gray worries of age. America, as the oppressed of all lands have dreamed America to be, and America _as it is_, flashed before me--a banner of fire! Behind me I felt masses pressing--thousands of immigrants--thousands upon thousands crushed by injustice, lifted me as on wings. I entered the boss’s office without a shadow of fear. I was not I--the wrongs of my people burned through me till I felt the very flesh of my body a living flame of rebellion. I faced the boss. “We can’t stand it!” I cried. “Even as it is we’re hungry. Fifty cents a dozen would starve us. Can you, a Jew, tear the bread from another Jew’s mouth?” “You, fresh mouth, you! Who are you to learn me my business?” “Weren’t you yourself once a machine slave--your life in the hands of your boss?” “You--loaferin--money for nothing you want! The minute they begin to talk English they get flies in their nose.... A black year on you--trouble-maker! I’ll have no smart heads in my shop! Such freshness! Out you get ... out from my shop!”