We Americans do not rank among the enlightened nations when we are graded according to our care of our children. We have, according to the last census, 580,000 who cannot read or write, between the ages of ten and fourteen years, not immigrant but native-born children, and 570,000 of them are in States where the women do not even use their right of petition. We do not rank with England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Holland or the Scandinavian countries when we are measured by our care of our children, we rank with Russia. The same thing is true of our children at work. We have two millions of them earning their living under the age of sixteen years. Legislation of the States south of Maryland for the children is like the legislation of England in 1844.... Surely it behooves us to do something at once or what sort of citizens shall we have? Miss Gertrude Barnum, secretary of the Women's National Trade Union League, followed with an earnest address on Women as Wage Earners. She began by saying that although this would be called a representative audience, wage-earning women were not present. "A speaker should have been chosen from their ranks," she said. "We have been preaching to them, teaching them,'rescuing' them, doing almost everything for them except knowing them and working with them for the good of our common country. These women of the trade unions, who have already learned to think and vote in them, would be a great addition, a great strength to this movement. The working women have much more need of the ballot than we of the so-called leisure class. We suffer from the insult of its refusal; we are denied the privilege of performing our obligations and we have as results things which we smart under. The working women have not only these insults and privations but they have also the knowledge that they are being destroyed, literally destroyed, body and soul, by conditions which they cannot touch by law...." Miss Barnum discussed "strikes," the "closed shop," conditions under which factory women work, the domestic problem, the trade unions, and said: "I hope that this body, which represents women from all over the country, will take this matter back to their respective States and cities and try to make the acquaintance of this great half of our population, the working people. You must bring them to your conferences and conventions and let them speak on your platform. They will speak much better for themselves than you can get any one to speak for them...."