Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/413

Rh not hear on all sides the complaint that, from the highest forms of brain-work to the lowest forms of hand-work, the strain requisite for success breaks down prematurely those who follow them? Is not the choice, too often, virtually between immediate death from want, or a more gradual and protracted death from overwork, or the unhealthy conditions of work?

Our organization of labor is exceedingly one-sided and imperfect. It is directed almost exclusively to the advancement of the work, without any reference to the welfare of the worker. We have a long way to go before we can be rid of the most crying evils of our present state.

It is only too evident that we have not yet solved the most fundamental problems in regard to labor, when we see such glaring contradictions as produce spoiling in the fields because there is no market for it, and mills stopping work because the market is over-supplied, when at the same time thousands are suffering from want of food and clothes. So long as the relations between workers and work are so imperfect, the hardships thus entailed must fall upon women as well as upon men.

One of the first requisites for improvement is to know the direction in which effort should be made. We must learn to distinguish the movement of the tide from the eddy caused by resistance to its advance. One of the greatest difficulties in the way of freedom of work for women will be removed when once it is recognized that in this direction is the onward movement of the current, however turbid it may be from the obstacles that disturb its course.



LL of those parts of South Africa which are under the dominion of the Bantu race are ethnographically so homogeneous that the essential facts that may be stated of one tribe apply almost exactly to all, and the differences in dress, stature, color of the skin, utensils and weapons, ornaments, customs, and ideas, which are produced by external and different temporary, not local, changes only, are limited in every case by the same lines. Many of the photographs brought by my friend and colleague Buchta from the Egyptian Soodan might as well have come from the territory I explored, diagonally opposite to it. The language of King Mtesa's Waganda has the same grammatical structure as that of the Angolese, and the vocabularies of both people have numerous similar words. 