During the five months which followed the writing of this letter, four thousand persons (most of them wage-earners in the prime of life) left Tasmania for Victoria.

One faction wanted to limit suffrage to unmarried women who own property and deprive married women and dependent daughters and wage-earners of the ballot.

Very different is the situation of the women wage-earners.

The improving mechanism of our State School System assists this movement, by turning out every year a larger percentage of half- timers, crammed to qualify for wage-earners at the earliest possible period.

But it is surely to be hoped that with every future rise in the wages and industrial position of male wage-earners, there may be a growing sentiment in favour of a restriction of industrial work among married women.

Then he began to handle law suits for wage-earners, which was altogether the reverse.

The brief historical sketch of the early trade unions is based almost entirely upon the "History of Women in Trade Unions," Volume X, of the "Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States," issued by the Commissioner of Labor, then Mr. Charles P. Neill.

But except indirectly, none of these associations have aided in the organization of women wage-earners, still less have taken it for their allotted task.

For the origin of the Women's Trade Union League, we must go back to 1874, when Mrs. Emma Patterson, the wife of an English trade unionist and herself deeply impressed with the deplorable condition of women wage-earners everywhere, was on a visit to the United States.

The element of permanence in men's organizations is in great measure the result of the fact that men, whether they remain in one particular trade or shift to another, are at least in industry for life as wage-earners, unless indeed they pass on into the employing or wage-paying class.

If organized women can best represent the wage-earners of their sex, we can gain the best collective statement of their wishes through them.

Meanwhile, married women, less handicapped than these, are experimenting on their own account, and are helping to place the work of wives as wage-earners on a more settled basis.

And unless we are to be the mere passive spectators of an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us who have leisure and opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to the problem not of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that possibility is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who seem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for very much longer.

And unless we are to be the mere passive spectators of an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us who have leisure and opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to the problem not of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that possibility is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who seem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for very much longer.

Suppose it turns out to be the case that a man always following one occupation throughout his lifetime, working regularly day after day for so many hours, as most wage-earners do at the present time, does not do nearly so much or nearly so well as he would do if he followed first one occupation and then another, or if he worked as hard as he possibly could for a definite period and then took holiday?

Or suppose that it falls to our country in some strange way to develop a new courage and enterprise, and to be the first to go forward into this new phase of civilisation I foresee, from which a distinctive labouring class, a class that is of expropriated wage-earners, will have almost completely disappeared.

Wages and salaries of many kinds go up and down less rapidly than do other prices, and thus to some extent wage-earners are in the position of passive capitalists[10] as regards changes in the monetary standard.

The strike is, in its direct and indirect, immediate and ultimate, effects the most important weapon of the organized wage-earners in their relations with their employers.

Almost always connected with a strike is the practice of the boycott, which is a combination of wage-earners to cut off an employer (or group of employers) from business dealings.

On no principle of value could the mere organization of one-twelfth of the wage-earners, without permanently withdrawing them from the labor market, explain the relatively high wages of the other eleven-twelfths.

The contributions are made 3/8 by employers, 3/8 by wage-earners, and 2/8 by the state.

The contributory principle should be adopted, and both employers and wage-earners contribute to the cost in equal amounts.

As the wage-earners have become relatively more numerous, many of them have felt more keenly the pressure of competition from immigrant labor.

Since 1890 the growth of consumers' coöperation among European industrial wage-earners has been phenomenal, especially in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.

A study of social conditions reveals the fact that for the larger part of the wage-earners the house has come to be the place where money is spent, not earned or even saved.