Here, then, it seemed to me, was the first chance to offer help.

The self-supporting woman should be in competition only with other self-supporting industrial units.  The problem for her class will settle itself, according to just and natural laws, when the purpose of this class is equally vital to all concerned.  Relief, it seemed to me, could be brought to the breadwinner by separating from her the girl who works for luxuries.

How could this be done?

There is, I believe, a way in which it can be accomplished naturally.  The non-self-supporting girls must be attracted into some field of work which requires instruction and an especial training, which pays them as well while calling into play higher faculties than the brutalizing machine labour.  This field of work is industrial art:  lace-making, hand-weaving, the fabrication of tissues and embroideries, gold-smithery, bookbinding, rug-weaving, woodcarving and inlaying, all the branches of industrial art which could be executed by woman in her home, all the manual labour which does not require physical strength, which would not place the woman, therefore, as an inferior in competition with man, but would call forth her taste and skill, her training and individuality, at the same time being consistent with her destiny as a woman.

The American factory girl has endless ambition.  She has a hunger for knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world, to improve.  There is ample material in the factories as they exist for forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers.  There is a great work to be accomplished by those who are willing to give their time and their money to lifting the non-breadwinners from the slavish, brutalizing machines at which they work, ignorant of anything better, and placing them by education, by cultivation, in positions of comparative freedom—­freedom of thought, taste and personality.

Classes in industrial art already exist at the Simmons School in Boston and Columbia University in New York.  New classes should be formed.  Individual enterprise should start the ball and keep it rolling until it is large enough to be held in Governmental hands.  It is not sufficient merely to form classes.  The right sort of pupils should be attracted.  There is not a factory which would not furnish some material.  The recompense for apprenticeship would be the social and intellectual advancement dear to every true American’s heart.  The question of wages would be self-regulating.  At Hull House, Chicago, in the Industrial Art School it has been proved that, provided the models be simple in proportion to the ability of the artisan, the work can be sold as fast as it is turned out.  The public is ready to buy the produce of hand-workers.  The girls I speak of are fit for advancement.  It is not a plan of charity, but one to ameliorate natural conditions.

Who will act as mediator?