She did not tell me just when and how she had come to the conclusion that wages must be higher, that legal enactment for better conditions must be supplemented by the efforts of the workers themselves, but it was absolutely clear that she had independently reached that conclusion long before a strike in the clothing industry brought her into contact with the organized Labor Movement. It was certainly not until the year of her husband’s death that she became aware of the industrial changes which had been taking place during the twenty-two years since her aunts’ business had been ruined. She was grateful that the knowledge had first come to her through an Italian girl working by her side, for, as she explained, her old attitude toward the “dagoes,” as a people to be exploited, had to be thoroughly changed before she could be of much real use in organizing a trade in which so many Italians were engaged. Even during the strike itself, to which she was thoroughly committed, having been convinced both of its inevitability and of the justice of its demands, she resented the fact that the leadership was in the hands of Russian Jews and, secure in her Americanism, she felt curiously aloof from the group with which she was so intimately identified. A few months after the strike my friend fortunately secured a place in a manufactory of men’s clothing, in which there had been instituted a Trade Board for the adjustment of grievances, and where wages and hours were determined by joint agreement. When she was elected to the position of shop representative she found herself in the midst of one of the most interesting experiments being carried on in the United States, not only from the standpoint of labor but from that of applying the principles of representative government in a new field. She felt the stimulus of being a part in that most absorbing of all occupations--the reconstruction of a living world.