Page:Our Girls.pdf/108

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92
OUR GIRLS

cottage to the best-appointed apartment in an institution. Something may yet be done towards giving the girls themselves the management of these hostels and thus stripping the institutions of their institutionalism, but meantime they are doing good work.

Better still is the propaganda work of the scientific committees which, under the direction of the Ministry, are showing employers how selfish and shallow is the old doctrine that you have discharged your duty to your work-girls when you have paid their wages. On going through the munition factories I have found no thought more insistent than this—here are three thousand beautiful machines; the owner walking by my side is immensely proud of them; the shining things are throbbing with a steady rhythmic hum that is music in his ears, and, naturally enough, he takes every possible care of them; yet there, standing by the side of one machine, is another machine of immeasurably greater beauty and complexity, capable of a