Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory. From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the race.
Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.
In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not afford to pay high wages.
The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located. And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:
"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for the community for you to close your factory. It would be better to send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter. My award is that you pay what they ask."
Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.