she enjoys as much as do the most capable of her sex, in their present so-called equality, she sees the position of her less fortunate sisters ameliorated chiefly through differential legislation.

She has neither shocked nor uplifted the world into acceptance of her code, she has simply been ready and waiting for every advantage that might be taken and never has allowed an advantage once gained to slip back..

The first woman industrial board chairman grew up in Boston where three causes a day are as common as the meals of other localities. However, the golden rule of her girlhood emanated largely from the pulpit and was practised chiefly in the parlor. It was as a young teacher near Chicago that she came into contact with the pragmatic idealism of Hull House. There she came to know a new love of mankind which was shorn equally of sentimentality and bank balance beatitudes.

Stirred by Jane Addams' fine discrimination between justice and sympathy and, most of all, by her practical direction of the philanthropic motive, Frances Perkins set about to supplement the armor of righteousness with complete data and the full history of the failures and successes of other social workers.

Instead of wading into the difficulties of industry with a reckless muckrake, she spent three years in libraries and lecture-rooms studying economics. Toward the completion of her doctorate, however, she grew more and more impatient of books; more and more eager to get at grips with the actual industrial problem.

And waiting for her young impatience was a job-a history-making job both for Miss Perkins and for thousands of her sex. It was lobbying for the fifty-four hour bill for women on behalf of the Consumers' League of New York.

A woman lobbyist was a novelty; idealists were just coming to recognize that the mills of the legislative gods grind exceeding slow if they lack the oil of practical politics.

Frances Perkins made the most of the opportunity. the opportunity. Her attendance on two sessions of the legislature was more faithful than that of any member. She made friends among legislators whenever that was possible and when it wasn't, made friendly enemies of her opponents.

Alfred E. Smith, then an assemblyman, came to know and respect the young woman's ability, and a friendship significant for the State of New York began. For "Al" Smith's "hunches" Miss Perkins was able to supply data; while her academic training was admirably supplemented by the political skill of the coming leader.

Though the emissary of a bluestocking group, she was able to convince "Big Tim" Sullivan that he and she could work together for their mutual advantage. The “King of the Bowery" liked her because she knew a liar-but didn't show itand he admired the rapidity with which she got a working knowledge of Albany politics.

For under the tuition of friendly newspaper men she was an apt student of the personalities of politics and of such maneuvers as getting bills out of committee when the committee didn't want them out.

The legislators themselves, began to tip her off on tricks of parliamentary procedure.

Eventually, "the" MacManus, senator from Hell's Kitchen, introduced the fifty-four hour bill, and "Big Tim" Sullivan sponsored it.

The legislative session of March 1910-11 dragged well into the summer. It was in March that the Washington Place factory fire determined the further development of Miss Perkins' career. Not only did she do her utmost in helping secure passage by June of the bill creating the Factory Investigating Commission, but her recommendations to Abram I. Elkus, counsel of the New York Committee on Safety were accepted by him as excellent material in the building of a working program.

Meanwhile the fifty-four hour bill was worrying through another legislative session. In those days telegrams from constituents were rare. Albany law-makers who found their desks covered with them were by no means unaffected. There were organized hearings before committees. Special trains carrying earnest delegations arrived in the capital city.

Nevertheless legislation remained ice-bound. Even Miss Perkins' courage was waning toward the close of the session. The MacManus bill for a fifty-four hour week for women remained in committee. At last by wile, wit and eternal vigilance it was coaxed out and favorably voted on by the Senate. But the end was not yet. Far from it.

The MacManus bill had failed to pass the assembly and the assemblymen whose consciences or whose reelection troubled them substituted

for it the Jackson bill, originally providing for a fifty-four hour week for all women workers but amended to exempt the canning industry. The Consumers' League naturally opposed such a bill-League members wanted to eat social justice as well as wear it on their backs. The League's lobbyist had fought the canning amendment to the Jackson bill to the moment of defeat.

But in the last hours of the session when it became apparent that the MacManus bill would not pass both houses, there began pounding in Frances Perkins' ears some pertinent statistics: 350,000 women affected, and only 5000 in canneries! 350,000 5000!

She decided instantly and without chance of conference with her supporters, to push the Jackson bill, amendment or no amendment. Since the bill already had passed the assembly, the Senate would have only to forget the MacManus bill and pass its foster-brother, the Jackson, in order to secure the benefits of a fifty-four hour law for the vast majority of working women then and there.

With double difficulty in the available minutes left, Miss Perkins transferred the loyalty of "the" MacManus and "Big Tim" Sullivan to the bill they all had fought together. Senator Sullivan and his cousin, Senator C. D. Sullivan, had been about to take the boat home when Miss Perkins intercepted them and won their coöperation in her last stratagem. Having given their consent they asked the clerk to record their ayes out of turn so that they still might get the boat for New York.

But to Miss Perkins' consterna

tion, when the cat was out of sight the mice began to play. Two promised ayes which paid dutiful allegiance to the crown when the Bowery ruler was bodily present, now changed to noes. In this last crisis Miss Perkins prevailed on her friends in the senate to have the bill reconsidered while she ran to a telephone booth and "got" the pier in time to fetch the tricked Sullivans back.

Their taxi stalled; they had to run part of the way; they arrived without a moment's leeway before door closing. But their return was triumphant. The recalcitrant noes sweetly and obediently answered "Aye," at the new roll-call and the Jackson bill awaited only the governor's signature to become law.

Yet at the height of this stirring victory, Miss Perkins was sure the Consumers' League would disapprove her compromise with practical politics. She was therefore a little dazed at the hearty and overwhelming congratulations on her quickwitted and dramatic conclusion of a long trench campaign waged against the huge bulk of industrial capital, doggedly convinced that the law was inimical to profits.

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Since that time capital apparently has changed its mind; increased human efficiency now goes into its calculations. And no single agency did more to effect this change than the findings of the Factory Investigating Commission.

This commission, it will be recalled, was created and its appropriation secured in response to the pressure of the New York Committee on Safety, which now availed itself of the successful fifty-four hour lobby

ist to further the program she already had helped plan.

The Committee on Safety immediately loaned its new secretary to the Factory Investigating Commission to organize its work and to appear as expert witness at its hearings.

Special training, education, practical legislative experience and workable social ideals in the person of Frances Perkins were now to be pitted against habit, prejudice and vested interests.

Yet so innocuous was the outward aspect of this young woman that vested interest-chiefly the capital invested or to be invested in loft buildings-scarcely took cognizance of her in the first hearings of the commission.

The able and talented lawyer for the real estate interests alarmed lest sentimental legislation make comparatively new buildings obsolete and the cost of further construction prohibitive, could scarcely believe his senses when he saw his chief antagonist. He felt like a battle-ship sent out to bring in a fishing-smack. "That little girl an expert!" he exclaimed.

But that was when the hearing opened in the aldermanic chamber of New York's City Hall. Later he discovered that the foe was worthy of his mettle. For Miss Perkins was prepared to inform the hearing and coincidentally the public at large, when a fire-escape is not a fireescape. She showed that the Asch building, which had trapped the employees of the shirt-waist factory, was rather exceptionally considerate of human life as loft factories went. Hundreds of other buildings with a

greater hazard of gas, irons, wooden equipment and helter-skelter refuse, had fewer exits and all this invitation to disaster far above the seventh floor, the last at which Chief Croker said he was able to give a fire an honest fight.

Chemical and mechanical engineers in the employment of insurance underwriters were called to testify. They showed that even when existing laws were fully met in building requirements, many peaceable looking structures trustfully entered by hundreds of workers every morning-in relays, simultaneous entrance being impossible—were really little less than crematories, provided a flame, accidental or otherwise, was applied at any point.

"And the wonderful thing about engineers," says Miss Perkins, "is that they don't know how to lie. Their whole training and experience has to do with meeting natural laws, not evading them. A lie won't bridge a river nor make a building stand. Engineers get in the habit of thinking and telling the truth, and people recognize it in them."

When pertinent truth is brought to bear on such a crisis as that precipitated by the shirt-waist fire, something is going to happen. Something now happened-the fire prevention laws of the State of New York, and with them the other advanced labor laws of 1913-14-15 whose necessity was discovered and made public largely by the Factory Investigating Commission.

New

York with more than twice as many wage-earners and millions of dollars more invested in industrial plants than Wisconsin, was only two legislative sessions later than the west

ern state in creating an industrial board with full legislative and judicial powers. For the Factory Investigation Commission in ferreting out fire hazards unearthed many other conditions inimical to the safety and health of industrial workers.

Formerly the factory inspector had traveled by train. His arrival in a one-or-two-train-a-day permitted the station agent or any town loiterer to inform a factory management of his approach in advance.

The new commission,-not salaried-composed of two state senators, three assemblymen and four other citizens, made a point of traveling chiefly by automobile in order to make its visits unannounced. This was necessary if it was to discover the actual number of occupants housed in a given factory, since even the most upright employers did not hesitate to conceal such facts from interfering busybodies who knew less about the business of the owner than the owner knew, and nothing at all about making money.

The commission, therefore, discovered not only the inadequacy of fire-proofed stairways-basing the number of such stairways on the number of persons in a building was early recognized as the key to safety

but their surprise visits brought to light an astounding number of deliberate violations of the child labor law.

If there was no time to unlock the doors on exits, locked to prevent employees from sneaking out with stolen goods, there also was no time to hustle out by back doors large numbers of child-workers just before the commission arrived.

It was as a by-product of the fire prevention investigation, also, that Miss Perkins was able to introduce the members of the commission to the practical effect of laws permitting the night-work of women.

Legislators were clamoring, at the behest of constituents, for the exemption of small cities where there was little danger of overcrowding, from the requirements of the new factory laws. It took the sacrifice of more human victims, even while investigation was in progress, to demonstrate graphically that open stairways ordinarily adequate for the occupants, were flues for fire, and that outside fire-escapes were virtually useless. For in the Binghampton shoe factory fire which occurred at this time, twelve persons who were kept back from stairways by roaring gullets of flame were roasted to death on outside fire-escapes.

It was in looking into the fire prevention situation in the smaller communities that Miss Perkins, ever alert to the social implications of industry, came upon the haggard women of Auburn.

When she asked the Factory Investigating Commission to visit this little village at five o'clock in the morning there naturally were demurrers. But Miss Perkins insisted it was the only way in which to see and be convinced of what actually takes place when women are permitted by law to work at night.

The commission was at the mill gate when the night shift of women passed out and their husbands passed in for the day shift-for this was the first practical result of night-work for women. The wives did not look simply fatigued-they looked as if

they never had rested; no grime of sweat and toil could account for the veil of ugliness over them. So might prisoners have looked, and so might Doré have drawn the figures of "The Inferno" passing into another and deeper hell.

But this much any sentimentalist or superficial observer might have deduced; Miss Perkins led the commission to the workers' houses where they might see how the women employed their days. And the investigators had an actual view of these factory mothers going home to wake up their children, to get their breakfasts and to start them off to school. When the older ones had left and the housework was begun, the mothers tended the babies, cleaned the house and prepared the noonday meal. After the dinner dishes were washed, the children returned to school and a start made in preparing supperif the babies needed no special attention these part-mothers, partmachines, went to sleep.

Under favorable conditions their sleep might last as long as two or three hours. For it was not necessary to get up until time to put supper on the table and, having had a "bite," leave for the mill to greet their home-coming men at the gate.

Homes were worse than ill-managed orphan-asylums and mothers were living under worse than slavery conditions.

To-day Auburn is a model factory village. Men are paid a family wage and, for the most part, their wives stay at home minding the children and their domestic duties. When women have to work, they work in the day shifts.