Before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, Mrs. Ecob, of Albany, said: "You speak of chivalry. We scorn the word! What has your chivalry done for the weaker sex? Women are the unpaid laborers of the world--outcasts in government." Mrs. Hood, of Brooklyn, on the same occasion said: "Who dares insult our American manhood by declaring that men will be less courteous to mother, wife, and sister, because they are political equals? Woman's equality in the industrial world has to-day produced a nobler, better chivalry than was ever conceived by the knights of old." These two Suffrage leaders will have to settle between themselves the question which they have placed in dispute. It serves to point the moral of dilemma that attends an attempted adjustment of unnatural claims. Meantime government is caring for the weak, and chivalry is doing justice. The Labor Law that went into effect in this State on September 1st provided that children be classified so that those under fourteen years should not be employed in mercantile pursuits. Children between the ages of twelve and fourteen will be permitted to work in vacation, if they can show that they have attended school through the year. The girls between fourteen and twenty-one are not to be allowed to work more than ten hours a day. Their employment before 7 A.M. and after 10 P.M. is forbidden. Women and children are not allowed to work in basements, without permits from the Health Board as to the condition of the basement. Seats are to be provided for woman employees, forty-five minutes given them for luncheon, and proper lunch and toilet rooms to be secured. Penalties, ranging from a fine of $20 for the first offence to imprisonment, are prescribed for violation of the law. In his last report, published in January 1897, the New York Commissioner of Labor considers the low wages and petty wrongs of working women and girls in New York City. He advises the formation of unions among themselves for their better protection. Mr. Brooks does not agree with those who claim that possession of the ballot would raise wages. Mrs. Ames and Dr. Jacobi think it would only raise them through the indirect influence of the greater respect in which the worker would be held. This is safe ground again, because it is debatable; but the domestic servants of those who hold the former opinion might give them an object-lesson. Unfranchised as the servants are, they have only to make a threat of leaving to secure better wages.