Strikes And Wives

Souie two years ago the Londen Punch had a cartoon which was a complete epitome of the labor question in its relation to womau. A sturdy artisan sits at his suppor of cheese and beer, a picture of solid comfort alter the English ideal. The clock points to ten at night, by the fiaming candle that illumines his repast. His wife, on her her knees at his side, is mopping up the floor. Disordsred dress and weary face bear witness for her, while with some humor she ejaculates : " Got your ten hours ? Much good may it do you ! Tve been at work for seventeen, and aint done yet V' So, too, George Eliot, who can see through a clergyman's waistcoat as clearly as Trollope himself, pictures the fair and gentle wife of the pinched and struggling rector. He has been asleep for hours at her side while she, after a pietense of disposing herself to rest, quietly lights the lamp upon the workstand, throws a shawl over her shoulders, sits up in bed, and darns away at the children's stookings until dawn. There is no tariff of hours in a wonjan's work. Eector and artisan go through their busy day, working till they are weary ; but for them thore is a period in their waking hours at which work eeases and absolute rest of body begins. For the squalid wife in the one case, the careworn mother in the other, the entire round of the twenty-four brings no suoh golden time. Until her eyeballs f all with very weariness the working-woman's toil goes on. Even if she herself be an artisan with her stated hours of labor in the factory or at home, there are the dropped stitches, there are the household chorea, the womanly devices for decent living that fill in the rest till bed time. 80 it is that the strike - opportunity for detiant independence to the husband niechanic, for the satisfaction that comes of close followship in manly self-assertion if you will - brings to his already exhauated wife an overwhelming despair. " That way madness lies ! If her constant effort but serves to keep her children clean and ciad and her home in decent tidiness when Saturday night brings the wages home - what depth of privation awaits her now ! She has all tlie bitterness of the sacrifica ; she shares none of its glory. Bread for hor children and roof to cover them are nearer to her notions of independence than this " standing out,' and the dole that comes from the trades union. There is pathos enough, heaven knows, tin he banding together of the sons of toil, but there is also cruelty in it. There would be pathos and justice too, were the wife a consulted and assenting partner in the bond. As the heaviest burden falls on her, the strike, as at present conducted, is simply an institution of torture and terror to her. There is a fiction, still extant in some newspapers, which agrees tocall the wife a " supported" person. In even the arerage prosperous household, whose ways run smoothly, there is question if the wise executive ordering of the home comforts do not in itself fully balance the mere lucre that supplies them. But among mechamos and laboringmen, when the wife is the unpaid servant, toiling for love far longer than she ever could for pay, and often supplementing her husband's wages with some small earnings of her own, the fiction falls. It is a partnership of labor ; it should be of gain aud loss as well. When the American mechanic recognizes that his wife is his partner as well as his help-mate when he takes counsel with her as to his plans and profits of work, there will be a deeper interest, as well as a greater meaning, inherent in the philosophy of the strike. And such norrors as the recent Brooklyn tragedy, where the half-crazed mother sent her little ones " to heaven " to save them from the pitiless hardness of earth and cruelty of the long strike, will be spared to our shuddering records.