ers deprived of the necessities of life, for, according to statistics in Bohemia, one child out of thirty-six is still-born. Some people claim that women do not wish to return to the idyllic family hearth. Let such help to make it possible for women to return, and they will find but a small per cent remaining aloof from it. It is not woman herself who destroys family life, it is society; it is the employer's unscrupulous thirst for gain; this is the scourge that drives woman from the home out into the battle of life. Therefore it is the duty of every thoughtful member of society to make an effort to improve, materially and spiritually, the wretched condition of women laborers. Woman can reach a higher social status only when she ceases to be an automaton. When her labor in the home is justly valued and paid, only then will she cease to be man's competitor and become his companion.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF WOMEN TO THE APPLIED ARTS— ADDRESS BY FLORENCE ELIZABETH CORY OF NEW YORK.

Seventeen years ago, at the close of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, there was no practical woman designer for any industrial manufacturing purpose. There were women in England, Scotland, France, Belgium, and America who assisted male designers, and who occasionally put ideas on paper-as suggestions merely, as to what night be pleasing for wall-papers, textiles, jewelry, and dainty novelties. These drawings, however, were not practical working-designs, and could not be manufactured from directly, but were simply sketches which had to be redrawn and recolored by a practical man before they could be either woven or printed.

To-day there are in America alone hundreds of women who have learned, or are learning, the arts of practical, applied, industrial designs-women whose work can be

carried to the printing-drum or Jacquard loom and be manufactured from at once, without the intervention of a practical man. Unskilled labor and incompetent workmen have been the bane of the manufacturer, who has found it necessary to send abroad for designs made by skilled artists. There is no reason why the American woman should not prepare to retain some if not all of the remuneration now awarded the foreign designer. The field of industrial art is most interesting to women, and they certainly are possessed of a refined taste, a quick perception of color and form, delicacy of touch, originality of ideas, a sense of the fitness of things, and the patience neces sary to work out their ideas, provided they know the mechanical requirements, and the proper way to set forth these ideas on paper.

A few of the results already achieved by American women in the applied arts may be summed up as follows: Women have designed successfully for jewelry, lace, bookcovers, stained-glass, oil-cloths, carpets of all grades, rugs, wall-paper, silks, table-linen, dress-goods, ribbons, handkerchief-borders, and many other things. Miss Emma Humphreys of Delaware, Ohio, for the past few years has supported herself easily by making designs for wall-papers and printed silks. Miss Carrie Smith of Smithville, L. I., has for the past seven or eight years secured an ample liveli hood by designing rugs. Miss Elsa Bente of New York is employed by the Tapestry Brussels Company to make designs for woven silks. Miss Clara Woolley of Wilkesbarre, Pa., earned in ten weeks over five hundred dollars on wall-paper designs. Miss Mary A. Williamson of Indianapolis, Ind., designed the brocades for the inaugural robes of Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. McKee. Miss Ina Bullis of Trov, and Miss Mary Gazgam of Utica, N. Y., are employed by two of our largest and best-known wall-paper manufacturers. Miss Ama Malkin is employed in the designing room of Messrs. Cheney Bros. silk-mill of South Manchester, Conn. Miss Alice Laus is employed in a silk designing room

of Paterson, N. J. Miss Celia Craus of Bath, N. Y., is in the designing room of Hilton & Hughes (the old A. T. Stewart carpet factory). These few examples will serve to show that the position of women in the applied arts is no longer problematical, but an assured fact; that they can and do succeed as designers is a certainty, provided their instruction is practical, not theoretical.

As to the payment received by women for their designs, it is quite as high as that received by men for the same grade of work; and best of all, there is a steadily increasing demand for it. New factories are constantly springing up, old factories are enlarging their plants; each man is the rival of the other, and tries to produce the greatest variety of goods twice a year. American women have also designed for foreign manufacturers. The pupils of the School of Industrial Art and Technical Design for Women have designed ingrain carpets for Leeds and York, England, china for Carlsbad, Austria, toweling and table-linen for Dundee, Scotland, and embroidery and matting for Japan. Therefore let the would-be designer learn how to apply the principles of design practically, as well as artistically, let the originator herself be a practical designer, and thus secure independence.

DISCUSSION OF THE ABOVE SUBJECT WAS INTRODUCED BY EMILY SARTAIN OF PENNSYLVANIA AS FOLLOWS:

It is currently asserted that the goodly city of Philadel phia, whose art I have the honor to represent to-day, is very slow, but I must claim for her the credit of having founded fifty years ago - the first school of practical design for women. She already had founded the first American academy of fine arts, enriched by donations of casts from Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French; had established the first illustrated magazines, those far-flying messengers bearing art education to widely scattered

firesides; and also the first theater, that potent educator for good and for evil; while in the library founded by Benjamin Franklin, for the first time in the world, the idea of the circulating library was illustrated.

In these days of revived reminiscences of our Centennial Exhibition these words are surely not out of place.

With all the increased facilities for women's industrial art education offered to-day in so many well-equipped institutions, let us not be ungrateful to that noble woman, daughter of a governor of Ohio, daughter-in-law of a minister to England, who, a long half-century ago, divined the importance of opening this career for women, and whose work is still continued.

Art, applied or pictorial, is a plant of slow growth, and does not reach maturity outright. Mrs. Peter originated in the United States the movement to bring the taste of women, and their inherent love of color and grace of line, into touch with commercial demand through a thorough training in practical design, a movement which was followed within a few years in New York, Boston, and Baltimore. That peculiar disease of the eye called color-blindness exists among the sterner sex in the fixed proportion of four to five in the hundred, while among women the ratio is so small as not to amount to a percentage, it being only three or four in the thousand; so in this reunion to report progress it is natural that we should have to note great development in the applied arts, where sensitiveness to color is an essential. I do not narrow the term applied arts to mean alone those industrial arts which need a machine to translate and to embody the brain's conception, great as has been the progress in those branches.

In the Woman's Building, in the women's rooms of the Illinois and the Pennsylvania State buildings, you will see stained-glass windows, employing the latest resources of the art on its practical side to heighten the effect of color and tone qualities; mural decorations showing the impulse of the most recent movement in art thought, which started

with the story of St. Genevieve on the walls of the Pantheon; embroidered portières, which are full-chorded symphonies of color, the complementary and contrasting tones of warm and cool hues, giving the base and treble clef in the shortened scale of light and black. In engraving, both on wood and steel, in etching, in book illustration many women are now doing work of the highest class; and at least one woman architect, Minerva Parker Nichols, is changing the aspect of her city's streets with her many creations in brick and in stone, while Miss Hayden's beautiful building before our eyes here speaks for itself.

So many women have so long been doing first-class work in the applied arts that I think a young woman who is thoroughly equipped finds little discrimination against her sex; in fact, she perhaps obtains readier acceptance than her brother. For myself I may say that during many years of a successful business career as an engraver, my capability being once proven, my womanhood has been in nowise a disability among business men; chivalry even taking the form of prompt payment. Twice my father and brother have lost large amounts through the failure of publishers who had settled up my equally large accounts in full, and the only time I ever lost a bill was once when my engraved portrait of a man's wife did not portray her as handsome as she appeared in his eyes.

But many of the pioneers among our professional women were less fortunate, and carried graven on their faces the lines of nerve-tire and harassment, revolt against the trammels of destiny, and protest against the derision and skepticism of environing conservatism. The skepticism was sometimes justified by want of thoroughness; the fault not of the woman, but the racial fault of this new nation whose tense nervous organization responds readily in the all-accomplishing “spurt,” and often fails to apppreciate the dogged, steady, persistent pull upon the collar possible only to the certitude and mastery of thorough training. But now that the solid phalanx of competent professional wage