organizing the nomad laborers of the land, recognizing no moral claim
laid upon themselves by the very advantages enjoyed by themselves in
their own trade, advantages in which they took so much pride. That is
discouraging enough, but more discouraging still was it to gather one
day from the speech of one who urged convincingly that while both
for self-defense and for righteousness' sake, the skilled organized
workers must take up and make their own the cause of the unskilled and
exploited wanderers, that he too drew his line, and that he drew it at
the organization of the Chinese.[A]

[Footnote A: I am not here discussing the unrestricted admission
of Orientals under present economic conditions. I merely use the
illustration to press the point, that organized labor should include
in its ranks all workers already in the United States. A number of the
miners in British Columbia are advocates of the organization of the
Chinese miners in that province.]

Others again, while they do not openly assert that they disapprove of
the bringing of women into the trade unions, not only give no active
assistance towards that end, but in their blindness even advocate the
exclusion of women from the trades, and especially from their own
particular trade. The arguments which they put forward are mostly of
these types: "Girls oughtn't to be in our trade, it isn't fit for
girls"; or, "Married women oughtn't to work"; or, "Women folks should
stay at home," and if the speaker is a humane and kindly disposed man,
he will add, "and that's where they'll all be one of these days,
when we've got things straightened out again." As instances of this
attitude on the part of trade-union men who ought to know better, and
its results, the pressmen in the printing shops of our great cities
are well organized, and the girls who feed the presses, and stand