"They trifle with love," 70 After Saturday night's shopping, 84 Sunday evening at Silver Lake, 96 "The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards," 102 In a Chicago theatrical costume factory, 114 Chicago types, 128 The rear of a Chicago tenement, 144 A delicate type of beauty at work in a Lynn shoe factory, 172 One of the swells of the factory: a very expert "vamper," an Irish girl, earning from $10 to $14 a week, 172 "Learning" a new hand, 184 The window side of Miss K.'s parlour at Lynn, Mass., 196 "Fancy gumming," 210 An all-round, experienced hand, 210 "Mighty mill--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate," 220 "The Southern mill-hand's face is unique, a fearful type," 240 * * * * * THE WOMAN WHO TOILS CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTORY BY MRS. JOHN VAN VORST * * * * * CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY Any journey into the world, any research in literature, any study of society, demonstrates the existence of two distinct classes designated as the rich and the poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the upper and the lower, the educated and the uneducated--and a further variety of opposing epithets. Few of us who belong to the former category have come into more than brief contact with the labourers who, in the factories or elsewhere, gain from day to day a livelihood frequently insufficient for their needs. Yet all of us are troubled by their struggle, all of us recognize the misery of their surroundings, the paucity of their moral and esthetic inspiration, their lack of opportunity for physical development. All of us have a longing, pronounced or latent, to help them, to alleviate their distress, to better their condition in some, in every way. Now concerning this unknown class whose oppression we deplore we have two sources of information: the financiers who, for their own material advancement, use the labourer as a means, and the philanthropists who consider the poor as objects of charity, to be treated sentimentally, or as economic cases to be studied theoretically. It is not by economics nor by the distribution of bread alone that we can find a solution for the social problem. More important for the happiness of man is the hope we cherish of eventually bringing about a reign of justice and equality upon earth.