But it began to be arithmetically clear all around that it wasn’t wise for a woman in England or France or anywhere else to be working for too little pay to buy a good breakfast! That reliable organ of public opinion, _The Times_, announced September 25, 1916: “Proper meals for the workers is, indeed, an indispensable condition for the maintenance of output on which our fighting forces depend, not only for victory, but for their very lives.” What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the _crèche_ or the maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a new ribbon for her hat—why, she will go without her bacon to get it! What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, don’t ask foolish questions. At last she has those mysterious expenses, even as a man! I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see it. Great Britain led the way with the now famous Orders L-2, which has come to be known as the Munition Women’s Charter. There is assured to women in the government factories and government controlled factories equal pay on piece work, equal pay on time work for one woman doing the work of one fully skilled man, and a minimum of £1 a week for all women engaged on work that was formerly customarily done by men. France followed with a declaration for equal pay for piece work for women. Governments have now enunciated the principle, have adopted it in practice and have recommended its justice to the private employer. Watch the skilled workman himself do the rest! Among the trade unions that have already stipulated equal pay for equal work for women doing war work in their craft are these: Engineering, cotton, woollen and worsted, china and earthenware, bleaching and dyeing, furniture and woodwork, hosiery manufacturing and the National Union of Railwaymen.