The imagination of New Yorkers has been fired from time to time by young working women who have had no little influence in helping to rouse public interest in labor conditions. My associates and I, in the early years of the settlement, owed much to a mother and daughter of singularly lofty mind and character, both working women, who for a time joined the settlement family. They had been affiliated with labor organizations almost all their lives. The ardor of the daughter continually prodded us to action, and the clear-minded, intellectual mother helped us to a completer realization of the deep-lying causes that had inspired Mazzini and other great leaders, whose works we were re-reading. More recently a young capmaker has stimulated recognition of the public’s responsibility for the well-being of the young worker. Despite her long hours, she found time to organize a union in her trade, not in a spurt of enthusiasm, but as a result of a sober realization that women workers must stand together for themselves and for those who come after them. The inquiry that followed the disastrous fire in the factory of the Triangle Waist Company in March, 1911, when one hundred and forty-three girls were burned, or leaped from windows to their death, disclosed the fact that the owners of this factory, like many others, kept the doors of the lofts locked. Hundreds of girls, many stories above the streets, were thus cut off from access to stairs or fire-escapes because of the fear of small thefts of material. The girls in this factory had tried, a short time before the fire, to organize a union to protest against bad shop conditions and petty tyrannies. After the tragedy, at a meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House called together by horrified men and women of the city, this young capmaker stood at the edge of the great opera-house stage and in a voice hardly raised, though it reached every person in that vast audience, arraigned society for regarding human life so cheaply. No one could have been insensitive to her cry for justice, her anguish over the youth so ruthlessly destroyed; and there must have been many in that audience for whom ever after the little, brown-clad figure with the tragic voice symbolized the factory girl in the lofts high above the streets of an indifferent metropolis.