Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/464

460 a net half million of, in great part, poverty-stricken immigrants—and this in face of the fact that our country is no longer able to provide work for those already here. If it be true that the alleged number of children die because they or their parents have insufficient nourishment, one must concede that their deaths are a blessing to themselves and to the community. Such children should not have been born. But the assertions are a priori, they can not be proved and are closely related to the other assertion that poverty is the cause, not merely a cause of crime. The statement of an abandoned woman before a State Commission is accepted as final, despite the counter assertion of the associated social workers, whose close relations with the impoverished classes should make their statements authoritative. But the slanderous statement is spread broadcast and wage-earning women are viewed with suspicion.

It may well be that not a low wage, but a wage too low to gratify vanity or the desire for luxuries, may be the determining cause in a great proportion of cases. Sexual desire is the strongest natural appetite in every normal young man or woman. If there be a deep-seated moral sense, the wage will make no difference. If there be no moral sense, the wage is unimportant. So long as the chief deterrent from gratification of the desire is the fear of inconvenience and social disgrace, yielding to temptation will be dependent on the danger of exposure. Unquestionably, the majority of fallen women come from the poorer classes, because those classes are by far the most numerous; but a very considerable proportion have come from among those whose wages are far from low, while the record of divorce courts make very clear that even the possession of wealth can not prevent women from straying. This question of morals in women employees answers well as a slogan in attacks upon wage-payers, but it appears to sink into insignificance when it involves the rights of wage-earners as against the wage-payer. A telegram from Everett, Washington, dated October 23, of last year and published in the New York papers, gives the illustration. The manager of a telephone company, appearing before the State Industrial Commission, held that employers should weed out from their service all immoral girls and women. But two women members of the commission maintained that employers should not concern themselves about the morality or immorality of women employees, provided these perform their tasks efficiently; these commissioners insisted that the employer has no right to exercise any control over the conduct of employees outside of working hours.

The demand that all should be able to live according to the "American" standard, whatever that may mean, is coupled with the assertion that wages have not kept pace with the increased cost of living. Tables of comparative prices are published in the daily papers, which prove that the cost of food has increased incredibly within a decade or two. It is well understood that one can prove almost anything by means of