the girl for her appearance and her rough speech, or to let your humanity get the better of your assumed composure, and think of your own sixteenyear-old sister placed in a like position. But, you must remember, you are new to such things. You see them with amateur eyes and they hurt— simply because you are tender. When you become more calloused, you will be more comfortable. Familiarity breeds content. Listen, for instance, to the opinion of the Inspectors, too, become more or less used to such "Conditions under which women and girls work here are frightfully bad. Must stand constantly. Each girl tends HER OLDER SISTER COMES two or three machines. The arms of the girls are covered up to the shoulders with the grinding solution which pours. over the bolts as they are being cut. Their dresses are wet and dirty as a result of the grinding solution-part of it is constantly splashing upon them. They operate machines that only men should operate and which formerly were operated by men. The floor is wet, the light is not very good, and the ventilation. is poor. There is no chance for them to stop for a moment unless they leave their machines and go to the toilets. One of the girls said they had to get away once in a while or they couldn't stand the pressure. "On the cold winter mornings the girls who operate the thread-cutting machines can't do much until the grinding solution gets thawed out by pouring over the cutting surface. This cold solution cracks their hands and pains them terPLANT OF THE OLIVER IRON AND STEEL COMPANY BEDFORD PUBLIC SCHOOL It is here that the big plant finds its recruits. Since the school is just across the street, it has not far to go. ribly when it gets into the cracks. One of the girls said you could see girls crying from the pain as they work in the morning. The investigator noticed that most of the girls had rags wrapped around their fingers. The boss assured him that they seldom had any acci of making half as many bolts. To earn a day's wage of eighty-four cents at bolt threading, a girl must finish seven thousand bolts of the smaller size. Still less is earned by girls employed in putting wood points for glass insulators on telegraph hardware. One girl's pay envelope showed, it is stated, two dollars and ten cents for a week's work. Then there are the "tying up girls"very small girls, most of them under sixteen years of age, who bind up the bolts in packages of twenty-four each. It is work that requires no skill, but the girls are required to stand constantly and to lift the heavy packages of bolts. The "tying up girls", together with the children employed in screwing nuts on bolts, receive wages that taper off to the lowest paid in the mills-about twentyeight cents a day! Efficiency has been the watchword of the Pittsburgh Board of Education. It has been found that the new President has a "good business head." The Board under the leadership of President David B. Oliver has done excellent work in making every dollar expended come back in a dollar's worth of school efficiency. Such service cannot be commended too highly. And here we behold a paradox! The genius for efficiency which marks the Oliver family is exerted simultaneously for the building up and the breaking which is the moving power, but merely the cold, "practical" objective of "efficiency"-the instinct to wring the largest possible return from the least possible expenditure. How long would it take one of the mills, of which the Oliver mill is only a type, to neutralize the benefit gained from a grammar school course? Mr. Jones in his report says: "After one has watched these girls and women at work and thinks of them being in the midst of the dirt and deafening noise of the machines, and keeping up the pace for ten and a half hours a day, one doesn't doubt the truth of the statement of one of the girls that a girl looks old after she has worked there a couple of years. One naturally wonders what becomes of these girls who wear out their youth at these machines. What kind of preparation are they getting for motherhood or home-keeping? Is it any wonder that so many of them know so little about cooking, or keeping homes, or caring for their babies? One even wonders, in view of all the scientific opinions as to the ill effects of constant standing, nervous strain, and noise upon women, if these girls and women would be capable of giving birth to a healthy, normal child." Brutality of foremen, grilling work, starvation wages, unlawfully long hours, unsanitary conditions, and a frightful breeding of immorality are things which must finally bring a common protest even from a band of unorganized, ignorant children. At last the long anticipated crash came. One morning the newspapers excitedly announced that a strike had been called at the Oliver Plant. A hundred girls, most of them children, left their machines. Their temerity amazed Pittsburgh. They had no leader, no organizer, no definitely formulated demands. It was just an instinctive, spontaneous revolt against conditions that seemed to have reached the breaking point. During the next few days eight hundred more of the Oliver child workers joined the courageous first hundred. The Industrial Workers of the World stepped in. Its organizer, Henry Armands, set about to bring an ordered protest out of the confused, bewildered babel. of the revolt. Meetings were held and strike committees organized. The ranks of the strikers swelled daily. The women, the boys, and finally most of the men employed in the Plant joined the movement. The result was that, within a week, scarcely one hundred of the three thousand workers in the Oliver mill remained at work. The greater part of the Plant closed down. "There is not a machine operator who cannot average from one dollar and forty cents to one dollar and sixty cents a day," said an assistant foreman, Parker, in a letter to one of the newspapers. Parker had been accused by the strikers of gross cruelty to his girls whose average pay was claimed to be below eighty cents a day. "As to the lowest paid ones," continued Parker, "they get about twenty-eight cents a day for nutting bolts. There is a better wage paid today than there has been for fifteen years. .. The work of threading bolts is not dangerous or hard on the fingers, as they state, nor do they work under frightful conditions, for there are some girls that come to work with silk waists on and never get them soiled. You would think they were going to a picnic.' The italics are, of course, not Parker's. The "greasy Olivers" hardly knew whether to regard this epistle as an outrage or a joke. At last, they evidently decided on the latter, for they renamed themselves ironically the "silk waist brigade", and there was scarcely a strikers' meeting at which there was not derisive reference, either on the platform or in the ranks, to "Parker's picnic on twenty-eight cents a day." When the demands had been formulated-for an eight hour day, abolition of piecework, and increases varying from fifteen to thirty per cent-the strikers looked about for some one to whom they might present their ultimatum. Then arose a puzzling situation. No one could discover who really owns the Oliver Plant! The various members of the Oliver family only smiled when asked what interest they had in the mill; and then calmly passed the inquirer along to another member. "You should see my brother," they would say, or "you had better talk with my uncle." Popular Pittsburgh was convinced that most of those interviewed were interested in the concern. But no such admission could be wrung from the coy, retiring Oliver brothers and nephews in the regally appointed Oliver HER MOTHER USED TO TEND A Children of steel-working women are only too often below physical and mental par, as a result of the mothers' strength having been spent in the mills. Building on Oliver Avenue, a stone's throw from the City Hall. and rails. It calls down terrific maledictions. It issues fierce ultimatums. It "Go after George T. Oliver," cried the mercilessly points the way to the ash strikers. There was little doubt that Senator George T. Oliver, chiefly, and David "I have no interest in the firm," Senator Oliver replied. "The mills were established by my older brothers and are now owned and operated by their children." Then he added a statement that threw the "greasy Olivers" into a fury and made all Pittsburgh gasp. "I was not aware that girls were employed in the mills until I read the papers this morning." Here was the "Senator from Pennsylvania One can hardly expect strong. healthy, clear-eyed children from mothers whose vitality has been ground out by long, grilling labor in the steel mills. who had many times posed in the United States Senate as an authority on industrial industrial conditions in western Pennsylvania, professing himself as unaware that girls were employed in the Plant whose wealth had made his senatorship possible. There was scarcely a man, or woman, in Pittsburgh who had not known for many years that girls were employed in the Oliver mills. The opposition newspapers had seen to that. And now one newspaper flew into an ecstasy of rage, captioning a burning editorial with "SELF-BRANDED" and terminating it with the irate query, "Is Oliver a liar or an ignoramus? Or an ignoramus? Or both?" There is something amusing, and pitiful, about the unmoneyed newspaper that attempts to assail the impregnable strongholds of Money. The paper rants heap, the backwoods, the limbo of public disgrace, the infernal regions-anywhere and everywhere that might be considered distasteful to gentlemen who have learned to occupy the chief seats at the table, to use a beaten gold finger bowl without amateur shyness, and to smoke a fifty-cent cigar without a qualm. And, if Money takes any notice of this small rampageous intruder, it is merely as a fat nabob after a dinner might squint in drowsy amazement at the gyrations of a Hindu dancer imported for his entertainment. Resignations are furiously demanded. But no resignation materializes. And then the advertisers get together as they did in. Pittsburgh-and threaten vacate their plots of advertising space if the paper continues to "injure trade" and "vilify prominent fellow citizens." Silence promptly ensues. Money sows more seeds in the silence and new brambly roses spring up to irritate the sensibilities of the "organ of the people." Inconsistently the "organ" refuses to see the roses the comfort-spreading industrial achievements of the captains of industry-but it insists on sticking itself upon the brambles. Admittedly there are all too many brambles. It is like a Lilliputian spitting at a Brobdingnagian. The vilification rarely reaches higher than the big fellow's boot tops. It is only when the Lilliputian's sincerity is as strong and clear as the sun that the allegiance of a multitude of brother Lilliputians is finally claimed and jaded public opinion is focused. Then the slow wheels of government crank out a law intended to serve as a |