But modern democracy must take on itself part of the blame which it throws on the idlers. The rich are being gradually and relentlessly excluded as a rule from public office in all the democratic countries. There are enough well-to-do men of leisure in New York to give us an excellent city government without payment, except in the subordinate places, were the poor willing to give up their chance of the salaries. Venice, in its best days, secured a large body of good officials by compelling men of fortune to serve in the offices to which they were elected. Berlin has to-day a first-rate common council made up in the same way. But there is very little chance of our seeing this system spread. The most discouraging phenomena of government by universal suffrage thus far is its strong tendency to treat public offices as "plums" rather than trusts, to be distributed among poor men as rewards for winning elections, and to consider indifference to the salary as a positive disqualification.

As long as this tendency lasts, we fear the alienation of the rich and their disposition to make amusement a serious business will continue, and the chief cure will be found only in the resolute resistance of the individual conscience. Nothing does more in this country to recruit the ranks of the pleasure-seekers than the tendency of rich fathers, backed up in this by the public generally, to treat moneymaking as the only serious business of life. A young man bred in this notion naturally says to himself when he inherits a fortune: "Money-getting, however laudable a pursuit in itself, is surely only incumbent on those who have not got it or want more of it than they have got. Why should I, who have got all I want, continue to work for it? No, I must enjoy it." And when he has given himself up to the child's life, buying fresh toys every day and throwing them away the next, the only thing which excites the wonder of those of his friends and neighbors who do not envy him, is that he should not have "stayed in business." The truth is that there has never been an age of the world in which there were such opportunities for men of fortune to find enjoyment in contributions to the general welfare. To some natures philanthropy, pure and simple, is odious, but there remain art, literature, science, agriculture, education. By this last I do not mean simply the instruction of youth either at schools or colleges, but also the work of persuasion through voice and pen. There never has been in the history of the world such a field for orators and writers as a democratic country now offers. There is no nobler nor more fascinating game than the work of changing the opinions of

great bodies of men, by inducing them to discard old beliefs and take on new ones, or arresting their rush after strange gods. But very few indeed ever take up any such work late in life. The taste for it must be formed and the equipment provided in youth. Though last, not least, the delusion must be got rid of that there is no use in trying to act on the minds of one's fellow-men unless one can thereby get an office. It is this which makes a great many useful young men wash their hands of politics and go in for polo and tennis and flirtations instead. Official life, as our Government is now organized, has no field for a really high ambition. Public functionaries are becoming more and more the puppets of the managers outside, and the managers are whatever public opinion lets them be or insists on their being. The coming rulers of men are those who mould the thoughts or sway the passions of the multitude.

E. L. GODKIN

DOES THE FACTORY INCREASE IMMORALITY?

THE entrance of woman into industries was assured when the factory system of labor displaced the hand system. Harriet Martineau, on her visit to America in 1840, found but seven employments open to woman-teaching, needle-work, keeping boarders, working in cottonmills, type-setting, work in bookbinderies, and household service. To-day there are but few lines of remunerative employment not open to her. In Massachusetts-and the statistics in Massachusetts are indicative of conditions in all advanced States-of the 394,584 persons engaged in all the great industries in 1885, 112,762 were women and 281,822 men; and the percentages of women engaged in different industries were as follows:

The Federal Commissioner of Education states that of the whole number of public-school teachers in the United States 65.5 per cent, and in Massachusetts and New Hampshire more than 90 per cent, are women. These figures show how thoroughly woman has broken out of industrial subjection into a free field.

One of the most important questions that arises is, How has woman's moral and intellectual condition been changed by her new industrial environment? To my own mind this is an entirely onesided question, although I am free to admit that my views have undergone something of a change as official investigation has progressed. That she is intellectually better off now, there is no question. The factory has taken the lowest orders and raised them to higher planes; that is to say, while the factory has simplified labor and thus enabled a comparatively ignorant class to perform the work, it has raised this comparatively ignorant class to a higher intellectual plane, while it cannot be shown that it has caused women of higher intellectual development to degenerate from their former standard.

In the Eastern States we have seen the gradual changes in fifty years of three nationalities of factory employees. The American girl, the daughter of the farmer in New England or the Middle States, was formerly found in the textile factories. She gave place to the English girl, and the English girl in turn to the Irish operative. The Irish operative has gradually given place to the French-Canadian, and many Swedes are now taking their places at the looms and before the spinning frames. But successively each has stepped up in the scale of civilization and in the improved conditions of her environment. Irish girls are now found in our great stores-bright, keen saleswomen. The daughters of scrubwomen, having received an education in our public schools, have become ambitious to occupy places that their mothers could not occupy. These facts prove emphatically the intellectual advantages which have surrounded woman, while in the higher lines of work the opening of universities and colleges and the higher institutions of learning has enabled her to become equipped for the best professional employment. The number of colleges and other institutions to which woman has access to-day in this country alone strongly supports this position. There are now 228 colleges of the liberal arts and 198 institutions for higher instruction open to woman. Without industrial prosperity and the mental stimulation which has come through active remunerative employment, it is not too much to say that this great number could not have been reached.

With reference to moral conditions, I am inclined to think that the popular impression is that, so far as wage-workers are concerned, the morals of woman are not up to the standard under the old hand system of labor, in which she took little or no part, and that her entrance into the industrial field has lowered her moral standard; and the statement is constantly made that low wages naturally compel women to supplement their earnings by an immoral life. I believe this view to be absolutely false, and that the workingwomen of this or any other civilized country are upon as high a plane of purity as any class in the community. I make this statement upon positive investigations which I have carried as far as it has been possible, but not so far as I hope to carry them; and in whatever direction I have. turned my studies of the moral character of women engaged in industry, the result has been the same, whether in this country, in Great Britain, or upon the continent of Europe. When I have officially stated the results of such investigations, I have from some quarters

been denounced as introducing evidence which tended to insult the very women involved, by implying that their character needed defence. Nothing has been further from my mind than this.

In 1881 I had the honor and the satisfaction of making an extended personal inquiry into the conditions surrounding factory life in this country and in Europe, and I found in that investigation that the charge that the factory promoted immorality and swelled the criminal lists was unfounded. The impression that the reverse was true first grew and gained prominence from the condition of Manchester, England, where a large cellarage population which formerly existed, but which has now almost entirely disappeared, was supposed to belong to the factory. The truth was that the cellarage population of Manchester was only to a very small degree a factory population. It belonged rather to the miserable hovel tenantry outside the factory workers which made Manchester's criminal lists in the past so large. The mistake, then, was in taking Manchester, which is not a purely factory town, as the criterion by which to judge the factory system; and from this mistake the idea became fixed in the minds of writers that the factory was responsible for immoral phases of life. It has been clearly shown by official returns from the penitentiary of Manchester that only eight out of fifty immoral women came from the factory, and twenty-nine out of fifty came from domestic service.

An extensive personal examination of the criminal records of a large number of British factory towns disclosed to me the fact that neither the ranks of the immoral nor the criminal lists were increased to so great an extent from the factory population as from other classes. A manager connected with the establishment of the Messrs. Coates, at Paisley, in Scotland, a man who had been in service more than forty years, informed me that during that whole period no one had ever gone from those works into a life of immorality. From the original entries of arrests, I was able to draw very clear conclusions, and these conclusions were in almost every case in favor of the working people, both male and female. Taking a series of years, from 1874 to 1880, inclusive, I found that the percentage of factory operatives twenty years of age and upward of the whole population in the city of Manchester was fourteen, while the percentage of arrests of factory operatives of the whole number of arrests was but nine and a half. M. Reybaud, in his investigations in France, found a constantly decreasing criminal list in a constantly increasing factory population. The conclusion is evident that if factories have a bad influence on morals,