When a girl cannot keep the pace she is thrown out. A comment frequently made by the girls about such an unfortunate comrade is: “She got too slow. She couldn’t keep up with her machine any longer.” It amounts to this, that the girl can earn a living wage, if she is unusually gifted, =until she is worn out=. The nerve strain caused by innumerable rapid-working machines of the present day has become obvious in many cases. As the compressed air-hammer has shattered the nerves of many robust men, so the latest machines used in the sewing and other trades have impaired the health of many women. “Such nerve strain,” says Rheta Childe Dorr, “cannot be regulated. It is a Gordian knot that cannot be untied. The only thing to do is to cut it. The only solution of it is a shortened work-day. This is true for men as well as for women, but, in all probability, not to the same degree. Nerve strain affects men, certainly, and it demands, even in their case, a progressively shortened work-day as an alternative to a progressively shortened work-life. But with women the case becomes infinitely more urgent, infinitely more tragic, in exact proportion as woman’s nervous system is more unstable than man’s and more easily shaken from its equilibrium.” The advantages of an eight-hour day with rest at night for women and children have been summed up as follows: 1.—Where the working day is short, the workers are less predisposed to diseases arising from fatigue. They are correspondingly less in danger of being out of work, for sickness is in turn one of the great causes of unemployment. 2.—Accidents have diminished conspicuously wherever working hours have been reduced. 3.—The workers have better opportunity for continuing their education out of working hours. Where they do this intelligently they become more valuable and are correspondingly less likely to become victims of unemployment. 4.—A short working day established by law tends automatically to regularize work. The interest of the employer is to have all hands continuously active, and no one sitting idly waiting for needles, or thread, or materials, or for machines to be repaired. Every effort is bent towards having work ready for every hour of every working day in the year. In unregulated industry, on the contrary, there are cruel alternations of idleness and overwork. 5.—For married women wage-earners it is especially necessary to have the working day short and work regular. For when they leave their workplace it is to cook, sew, and clean at home, sometimes even to care for the sick.— In the movement for an eight-hour day for the women workers its advocates have already succeeded in Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Porto Rico, and Mexico. The eight-hour day has also been secured for all employees of the U. S. Government and for the women and workmen of a large number of the states. EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK.