PRISONERS OF POVERTY

WOMEN WAGE-WORKERS,
THEIR TRADES AND THEIR LIVES.

By
HELEN CAMPBELL
AUTHOR OF “MRS. HERNDON’S INCOME,” “MISS MELINDA’S OPPORTUNITY,” ETC.

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1900

Copyright, 1887,
By Helen Campbell
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge

PRISONERS OF POVERTY.

PREFACE.

The chapters making up the present volume were prepared originally as a series of papers for the Sunday edition of “The New York Tribune,” and were based upon minutest personal research into the conditions described. Sketchy as the record may seem at points, it is a photograph from life; and the various characters, whether employers or employed, were all registered in case corroboration were needed. While research was limited to New York, the facts given are much the same for any large city, and thus have a value beyond their immediate application. No attempt at an understanding of the labor question as it faces us to-day can be successful till knowledge of its underlying conditions is assured.

It is such knowledge that the writer has aimed to present; and it takes more permanent form, not only for the many readers whose steady interest has been an added demand for faithful work, but, it is hoped, for a circle yet unreached, who, whether agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusions, still know that to learn the struggle and sorrow of the workers is the first step toward any genuine help.

Orange, New Jersey, March, 1887.

CONTENTS.

PRISONERS OF POVERTY.

CHAPTER FIRST.

WORKER AND TRADE.

In that antiquity which we who only are the real ancients look back upon as the elder world, counting those days as old which were but the beginning of the time we reckon, there were certain methods with workers that centuries ago ceased to have visible form. The Roman matron, whose susceptibilities from long wear and tear in the observation of fighting gladiators and the other mild amusements of the period, were a trifle blunted, felt no compunction in ordering a disobedient or otherwise objectionable slave into chains, and thereafter claiming the same portion of work as had been given untrammelled. The routine of the day demanded certain offices; but how these offices should be most easily fulfilled was no concern of master or mistress, who required simply fulfilment, and wasted no time on consideration of methods. In the homes of Pompeii, once more open to the sun, are the underground rooms where wretched men and women bowed under the weight of fetters, whose corrosion was not only in weary flesh, but in the no less weary soul; and Rome itself can still show the same remnants of long-forgotten wrong and oppression.

That day is over, and well over, we say. Only for a few barbarians still unreached by the march of civilization is any hint of such conditions possible, and even for them the days of darkness are numbered. And so the century moves on; and the few who question if indeed the bonds are quite broken, if civilization has civilized, and if men and women may claim in full their birthright of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are set down as hopeless carpers,—unpleasant, pragmatic, generally disagreeable objectors to things as they are. Or if it is admitted that there are defects here and there, and that much remains to be remedied, we are pointed with pride to the magnificent institutions of modern charity, where every possible want of all sorts and conditions of men is met and fulfilled.

“What more would you have?” cries the believer in things as they are. “What is higher or finer than the beautiful spirit that has taken permanent form in brick and mortar? Never since time began has charity been on so magnificent a scale; never has it been so intelligent, so far-seeing. No saints of the past were ever more vowed to good works than these uncanonized saints of to-day who give their lives to the poor and count them well lost. Shame on man or woman who questions the beautiful work or dares hint that under this fair surface rottenness and all foulness still seethe and simmer!”

It is not easy in the face of such feeling to affirm that, perfect as the modern system may be, beautiful as is much of the work accomplished, it still is wanting in one element, the lack of which has power to vitiate the whole. No good-will, no charity, however splendid, fills or can fill the place owned by that need which is forever first and most vital between man and man,—justice. No love, no labor, no self-sacrifice even, can balance that scale in which justice has no place. No knowledge nor wisdom nor any understanding that can come to man counts as force in the universe of God till that one word heads the list of all that must be known and loved and lived before ever the kingdom of heaven can begin upon earth.

It is because this is felt and believed by a few as a compelling power, by many as a dimly comprehended need, so far in the shadow that its form is still unknown, that I begin to-day the search for the real presence. What I write will be no fanciful picture of the hedged-in lives the conditions of which I began, many years ago, to study. If names are withheld, and localities not always indicated, it is not because they are not recorded in full, ready for reference or any required corroboration. Where the facts make against the worker, they are given with as minute detail as where they make against the employer. The one aim in the investigation has been and is to tell the truth simply, directly, and in full, leaving it for the reader to determine what share is his or hers in the evil or in the good that the methods of to-day may hold. That our system of charities and corrections is unsurpassable does not touch the case of the worker who wants no charity and needs no correction. It is something beyond either that must be understood. Till the methods of the day are analyzed, till one has defined justice, asked what claim it makes upon the personal life of man and woman, and mastered every detail that render definition more possible, the questions that perplex even the most conservative can have no solution for this generation or for any generation to come. To help toward such solution is the one purpose of all that will follow.

In the admirable report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor for 1885, made under the direction of Mr. Charles Peck, whose name is already the synonyme for careful and intelligent work, the number of working-women in New York is given as very nearly two hundred thousand. Investigations of the same nature have been made at other points, notably Boston, in the work of Mr. Carroll D. Wright, one of the most widely known of our statisticians. But neither Boston nor any other city of the United States offers the same facilities or gives as varied a range of employment as is to be found in New York, where grinding poverty and fabulous wealth walk side by side, and where the “life limit” in wages was established long before modern political economy had made the phrase current. This number does not include domestic servants, but is limited to actual handicrafts. Ninety-two trades are given as standing open to women to-day, and several have been added since the report was made. A lifetime would hardly be sufficient for a detailed examination of every industry in the great city, but it is quite possible to form a just judgment of the quality and character of all those which give employment to women. The city which affords the largest percentage of habitual drunkards, as well as the largest number of liquor saloons to the mile, is naturally that in which most women are forced to seek such means of subsistence may be had.

The better-paying trades are filled with women who have had some form of training in school or home, or have passed from one occupation to another, till that for which they had most aptitude has been determined. That, however, to which all the more helpless turn at once, as the one thing about the doing of which there can be no doubt or difficulty, is the one most overcrowded, most underpaid, and with its scale of payments lessening year by year. The girl too ignorant to reckon figures, too dull-witted to learn by observation, takes refuge in sewing in some of its many forms as the one thing possible to all grades of intelligence; and the woman with drunken or otherwise vicious husband, more helpless often than the widow who turns in the same direction, seeks the same sources of employment. If respectably dressed and able to furnish some reference, employment is often found by her in factory or some large establishments where regular workers have place. But if, as is often the case, the need for work arises from the death or the evil habits of the natural head of the family, fortunes have sunk to so low an ebb that often the only clothing left is on the back of the worker, in the last stages of demoralization; and the sole method of securing work is through the middle-men or “sweaters,” who ask no questions and require no reference, but make as large a profit for themselves as can be wrung from the helplessness and the bitter need of those with whom they reckon.

The difficulties to be faced by the woman whose only way of self-support is limited to the needle, whether in machine or hand work, fourfold. (1) Her own incompetency must very often head the list and prevent her from securing first-class work; (2) middle-men or sweaters lower the price to starvation point; (3) contract work done in prisons or reformatories brings about the same result; and (4) she is underbid from still another quarter, that of the country woman who takes the work at any price offered.

These conditions govern the character and quality of the work obtained, even the best firms being somewhat affected by the last two clauses. And in every trade there may always be found three distinct classes of employers: the west-side firms, which in many cases care for their workmen, in degree at least, and where the work is done under conditions that must be called favorable; the east-side firms, representing generally cheaper material and lower rates; and last, the slop-work, which may be either east or west, most often the former, and includes every form of outrage and oppression that workers can know.

Clothing in all its multiplied forms takes the first place in the ninety-two trades, and the workers on what is known as “white wear” form the large majority of the always increasing army. For many reasons, the shirt-makers naturally head the list,—the shirt-makers about whom has hung a certain sentimental interest since the day when poor Tom Hood’s impassioned plea in their behalf first saw the light. Yet to-day, in spite of popular belief that they are the class most grossly wronged, the shirt-maker fares far better than the majority of the workers on any other form of clothing. This always, however, if she is fortunate enough to have direct relation with some large factory, or with an establishment which gives out the work directly into the hands of the women themselves. Given these conditions, it is possible for a first-class operator to make from seven to twelve dollars per week, the latter sum being certain only in the factories where steam is the motive power and where experience has given the utmost facility in handling the work. In one factory on the west side, employing some one hundred and fifty girls, and where everything had been brought to almost mathematical accuracy, the price paid per dozen for shirts was $2.40. But one of the operatives was able to make a dozen a day, her usual average being about nine, or five dozen per week of sixty hours. Here every condition was exceptionally favorable. The building occupied the centre of a small square, and thus had light on all sides; ventilation was good; and the forewoman, on whose intelligence and good disposition much of the comfort of the operatives depends, was far beyond the average woman in this position. The working day was ten hours, with half an hour for dinner, and the sanitary conditions more favorable than in any other establishment of the same size. Many of the operatives had been there for years, and the dull season, common to all phases of the clothing trade, was never marked enough here to produce discharges or materially lessen production. The wages averaged seven dollars per week, though the laundry women and finishers seldom exceeded five. No middle-men were employed, and none of the customary exactions in the way of fines and other impositions were practised. Piece-work was regarded as the only secure method for both employer and employed, as in such case it rested with the girl herself to make the highest or the lowest rate at pleasure. There were no holidays beyond the legal ones, but all the freedom possible to constant labor was given, the place representing the best conditions of this special industry. Another firm quite as well known and employing equal number of workers had found it more expedient to give up the factory system, and simply retained rooms for cutting and general handling of the completed work, giving it out in packages to workers at home. One woman employed by them for seven years had never made anything but the button-holes in the small piece attached to the bosom, and such fine lettering as was ordered for custom shirts, her wages in the busy season being often twelve dollars a week, the year’s average, however, bringing them to seven. She worked exclusively at home, and represented the best paid and most comfortable phase of the industry.

Descending a step, and turning to establishments on the east side, one found every phase of sanitary condition, including under this head bad ventilation, offensive odors, facilities for washing, quality of drinking water, position of water-closets, length of time allowed for lunch, length of working day, etc. Here the quality of the work was lower, material, thread, and sewing being all of an order to be expected from the price of the completed garment, ranging from forty to sixty cents. The wages, however, did not fall so far below the average as might be expected, the operator earning from five to eight dollars a week during the busy season. But the greater number of manufacturers on both east and west sides of the city turn over the work to middle-men, or send it to the country, many factories being run in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where rents are merely nominal. This proved to be the case with several firms whose names represent a large business, but who find less trouble and more profit in the contract system.

Still another method has gone far toward reducing the rates of payment to the city worker, and this is the giving out the work in packages to the wives and daughters of farmers in the outlying country. These women, having homes, and thus no rent or general expenses to meet, take the work at rates which for the city operators mean simply starvation, and thus prices are kept down, and one more stumbling-block put in the way of the unprotected worker. Careful examination of this phase shows that the applicants, many of whom give assumed names, work simply for the sake of pin-money, which is expended in dress. Now and then it is a case of want, and often that of a woman who, failing to make her husband see that she has any right to an actual cash share in what the work of her own hands has helped to earn, turns to this as the only method of securing some slight personal income. But for the most part, it is only for pin-money; and no argument could convince these earners that their work is in any degree illegitimate or fraught with saddest consequences to those who, because of it, receive just so much the less. Nor would it be possible to bring such argument to bear. To earn seems the inalienable right of any who are willing to work, and the result of methods will never be questioned by employer or employed, unless they are forced to it by more powerful considerations than any at present brought forward.

I have chosen to give these details minutely because they are, practically, the summing up, not only for shirt-making, but for every trade which can be said to come under the head of clothing, whether for men, women, or children,—this including every form of trimming or other adornment used in dress from artificial flowers to gimps, fringes, and buttons. And now, having given this general outline, we may pass to the stories of the units that make up this army,—stories chosen from quarters where doubt is impossible, and confirmed often by the unwilling testimony of those from whom the work has come, giving with them also the necessary details of the trades they may represent, and seeking first, last, and always, only the actual facts that make up the life of the worker.

CHAPTER SECOND.

THE CASE OF ROSE HAGGERTY.

“The case of Rose Haggerty.” So it stands on the little record-book in which long ago certain facts began to have place, each one a count in the indictment of the civilization of to-day, and each one the story not only of Rose but of many another in like case. For the student of conditions among working-women soon discovers that workers divide themselves naturally into four classes: (1) those who have made deliberate choice of a trade, fitted themselves carefully for it, and in time become experts, certain of employment and often of becoming themselves employers; (2) those who by death of relatives or other accident of fortune have been thrown upon their own resources and accept blindly the first means of support that offers, sometimes developing unexpected power and meeting with the same success as the first class; (3) those who have known no other life but that of work, and who accept that to which they most incline with neither energy nor ability enough to rise beyond a certain level; and (4) those who would not work at all save for the pressure of poverty, and who make no effort to gain more knowledge or to improve conditions. But the ebb and flow in this great sea of toiling humanity wipes out all dividing lines, and each class so shades into the next that formal division becomes impossible, but is rather a series of interchanges with no confinement to fixed limits. Often in passing from one trade to another, chance brings about much the same result for each class, and no energy or patience of effort is sufficient to check the inevitable descent into the valley of the shadow, where despair walks forever hand in hand with endeavor.

This time had by no means come for Rose, with just enough of her happy-go-lucky father’s nature to make her essentially optimistic. Born in a Cherry Street tenement-house, she had refused to be killed by semi-starvation or foul smells, or dirt of any nature whatsoever. Dennis Haggerty, longshoreman professionally, and doer of all odd jobs in the intervals of his discharges and re-engagements, explained the situation to his own satisfaction, if not to that of Rose and the five other small Haggertys remaining from the brood of twelve.

“If a man wants his dhrink that bad that no matter what he’s said overnight he’d sell his soul by the time mornin’ comes for even a thimbleful, he’s got jist to go to destruction, an’ there’s no sthoppin’ him. An’ I’ve small call to be blamin’ Norah whin she comforts herself a bit in the same manner of way, nor will I so long’s me name’s Dennis Haggerty. But you, Rose, you look out an’ get any money you’ll find in me pockets, an’ keep the children straight, an’ all the saints’ll see you through the job.”

Rose listened, the laugh in her blue eyes shadowed by the sense of responsibility that by seven was fully developed. She did not wonder that her mother drank. Why not, when there was no fire in the stove, and nothing to cook if there had been, and the children counted it a day when they had a scraping of butter on the bread? But, as often happens in these cases, the disgust at smell and taste of liquor grew with every month of her life, and two at least of the children shared it. They were never beaten; for Haggerty at his worst remained good-natured, and when sober wept maudlin tears over his flock and swore that no drop should ever pass his lips again; and Norah echoed every word, and for days perhaps washed and scrubbed and scoured, earning fair wages, and gradually redeeming the clothes or furniture pledged round the corner. Rose went to school when she had anything to wear, and learned in time, when she saw the first symptoms of another debauch, to bundle every wearable thing together and take them and all small properties to the old shoemaker on the first floor, where they remained in hiding till it was safe to produce them again. She had learned this and many another method before the fever which suddenly appeared in early spring took not only her father and mother, but the small Dennis whose career as newsboy had been her pride and delight, and who had been relied upon as half at least of their future dependence. There remained, then, Norah, hopelessly incurable of spinal disease and helpless to move save as Rose lifted her, and the three little ones, as to whose special gifts there was as yet no definite knowledge. In the mean time they were simply three very clamorous mouths to be stopped with such food as might be; and Rose entered a bag-factory a block away, leaving bread and knife and molasses-pitcher by Norah’s bed, and trusting the saints to avert disaster from the three experimenting babies. She earned the first month ten dollars, or two and a half a week, but being exceptionally quick, was promoted in the second to four dollars weekly. The rent was six dollars a month; and during the first one the old shoemaker came to the rescue, had an occasional eye to the children, and himself paid the rent, telling Rose to return it when she could. When the ten hours’ labor ended, the child, barely fourteen, rushed home to cook something warm for supper, and when the children were comforted and tucked away in the wretched old bed, that still was clean and decent, washed and mended their rags of clothes, and brought such order as she could into the forlorn room.

It was the old shoemaker, a patient, sad-eyed old Scotchman, who also had his story, who settled for her at last that a machine must be had in order that she might work at home. The woman in the room back of his took in shirts from a manufacturer on Division Street, and made often seven and eight dollars a week. She was ready to teach, and in two or three evenings Rose had practically mastered details, and settled that, as she was so young, she would not apply for work in person, but take it through Mrs. Moloney, who would be supposed to have gone into business on her own account as a “sweater.” Whatever temptations Mrs. Moloney may have had to make a little profit as “middle-man,” she resisted and herself saw that the machine selected was a good one; that no advantage was taken of Rose’s inexperience; and that the agent had no opportunity to follow out what had now and then been his method, and hint to the girl that her pretty face entitled her to concessions that would be best made in a private interview. Shame in every possible form and phase had been part of the girl’s knowledge since babyhood, but it had slipped away from her, as a foul garment might fall from the fair statue over which it had chanced to be thrown. It was not the innocence of ignorance,—a poor possession at best. It was an ingrained repulsion, born Heaven knows how, and growing as mysteriously with her growth, an invisible yet most potent armor, recognized by every dweller in the swarming tenement. She had her father’s quick tongue and laughing eyes, but they could flash as well, and the few who tried a coarse jest shrunk back from both look and scorching word.

Thus far all went well with the poor little fortunes. She worked always ten and twelve, sometimes fourteen, hours a day, yet her strength did not fail, and there was no dearth of work. It was in 1880, and prices were nearly double the present rates. To-day work from the same establishment means not over $4.50 per week, and has even fallen as low as $3.50. In 1880 the shirts were given out by the dozen as at present, going back to the factory to pass through the hands of the finisher and buttonhole maker. The machine operator could make nine of the best class of shirts in a day of ten hours, being paid for them at the rate of $1.75 per dozen. Four spools of cotton, two hundred yards each, were required for a dozen, the price of which must be deducted from the receipts; but the firm preferred to supply twenty-four-hundred-yard spools, at fifty cents for six-cord cotton used for the upper thread, and thirty cents for the three-cord cotton used as under thread, the present prices for same quality and size being respectively forty-five and twenty-five cents. Making nine a day, the week’s wages would be for the four dozen and a half $7.87, or $7.50 deducting thread; but Rose averaged five dozen weekly, and for nearly two years counted herself as certain of not less than thirty dollars per month and often thirty-five. The machine had been paid for. The room took on as comfortable a look as its dingy walls and narrow windows would allow; and Bridget, age five, had developed distinct genius for housekeeping, and washed dishes and faces with equal energy and enthusiasm. She did all errands also, and could not be cheated in the matter of change. She knew where the largest loaves were to be had, and sniffed suspiciously at the packets of tea.

“By the time she’s seven, she’ll do all but the washing,” Rose said with pride, and Bridget reverted to childhood for an instant, and spun round on one foot as she made answer:—

“Shure, I could now, if you’d only be lettin’ me.”

“There’s women on the west side that’ll earn $2.50 a dozen, for work no better than you’re doing now,” some one who had come from that quarter said to her one day, but Rose shook her head. There is a curious conservatism among these workers, who cling to familiar haunts and regard unknown regions with suspicion and even terror.

“I’ve no time for change,” Rose said. “It might not be as certain when I’d got it. I’ll run no risks;” and she tugged her great bundle of work up the stairs, rejoicing that living so near saved just so much on expressage, a charge paid by the workers themselves.

There were signs well known to the old hands of a probable reduction of prices, weeks before the first cut came. More fault was found. A slipped stitch or a break in the thread was pounced upon with even more promptness than had been their usual portion. Some hands were discharged, and at last came the general cut, resented by some, wailed over by all, but accepted as inevitable. Another, and another, and another followed. Too much production; too many Jew firms competing and under-bidding; more and more foreigners coming in ready to take the work at half price. These reasons and a dozen others of the same order were given glibly, and at first with a certain show of kindliness and attempt to soften harsh facts as much as possible. But the patience of diplomacy soon failed, and questioners of all orders were told that if they did not like it they had nothing to do but to leave and allow a crowd of waiting substitutes to take their places at half rates. The shirt that had sold for seventy-five cents and one dollar had gone down to forty-five and sixty cents respectively, and as cottons and linens had fallen in the same proportion, there was still profit for all but the worker. Here and there were places on Grand or Division Streets where they might even be bought for thirty and forty cents, the price per dozen to the worker being at last from fifty to sixty cents. In the factories it was still possible to earn some approximation to the old rate, but employers had found that it was far cheaper to give out the work; some choosing to give the entire shirt at so much per dozen; others preferring to send out what is known as “team work,” flaps being done by one, bosoms by another, and so on.

For a time Rose hemmed shirt-flaps at four cents a dozen, then took first one form and then another of underclothing, the rates on which had fallen in the same proportion, to find each as sure a means of starvation as the last. She had no knowledge of ordinary family sewing, and no means of obtaining such work, had any training fitted her for it; domestic service was equally impossible for the same reason, and the added one that the children must not be left, and she struggled on, growing a little more haggard and worn with every week, but the pretty eyes still holding a gleam of the old merriment. Even that went at last. It was a hard winter. The steadiest work could not give them food enough or warmth enough. The children cried with hunger and shivered with cold. There was no refuge save in Norah’s bed, under the ragged quilts; and they cowered there till late in the day, watching Rose as she sat silent at the sewing-machine. There was small help for them in the house. The workers were all in like case, and for the most part drowned their troubles in stale beer from the bucket-shop below.

“Put the children in an asylum, and then you can marry Mike Rooney and be comfortable enough,” they said to her, but Rose shook her head.

“I’ve mothered ’em so far, and I’ll see ’em through,” she said, “but the saints only knows how. If I can’t do it by honest work, there’s one way left that’s sure, an’ I’ll try that.”

There came a Saturday night when she took her bundle of work, shirts again, and now eighty-five cents a dozen. There were five dozen, and when the $1.50 was laid aside for rent it was easy to see what remained for food, coal, and light. Clothing had ceased to be part of the question. The children were barefoot. They had a bit of meat on Sundays, but for the rest, bread, potatoes, and tea were the diet, with a cabbage and bit of pork now and then for luxuries. Norah had been failing, and to-night Rose planned to buy her “something with a taste to it,” and looked at the sausages hanging in long links with a sudden reckless determination to get enough for all. She was faint with hunger, and staggered as she passed a basement restaurant, from which came savory smells, snuffed longingly by some half-starved children. Her turn was long in coming, and as she laid her bundle on the counter she saw suddenly that her needle had “jumped,” and that half an inch or so of a band required resewing. As she looked the foreman’s knife slipped under the place, and in a moment half the band had been ripped.

“That’s no good,” he said. “You’re getting botchier all the time.”

“Give it to me,” Rose pleaded. “I’ll do it over.”

“Take it if you like,” he said indifferently, “but there’s no pay for that kind o’ work.”

He had counted her money as he spoke, and Rose cried out as she saw the sum.

“Do you mean you’ll cheat me of the whole dozen because half an inch on one is gone wrong?”

“Call it what you like,” he said. “R. & Co. ain’t going to send out anything but first-class work. Stand out of the way and let the next have a chance. There’s your three dollars and forty cents.”

Rose went out silently, choking down rash words that would have lost her work altogether, but as she left the dark stairs and felt again the cutting wind from the river, she stood still, something more than despair on her face. The children could hardly fare worse without her than with her. The river could not be colder than this cold world that gave her no chance, and that had no place for anything but rascals. She turned toward it as the thought came, but some one had her arm, and she cried out suddenly and tried to wrench away.

“Easy now,” a voice said. “You’re breakin’ your heart for trouble, an’ here I am in the nick o’ time. Come with me an’ you’ll have no more of it, for my pocket’s full to-night, an’ that’s more ’n it’ll be in the mornin’ if you don’t take me in tow.”

It was a sailor from a merchantman just in, and Rose looked at him for a moment. Then she took his arm and walked with him toward Roosevelt Street.

It might be dishonor, but it was certainly food and warmth for the children, and what did it matter? She had fought her fight for twenty years, and it had been a vain struggle. She took his money when morning came, and went home with the look that is on her face to-day.

“I’ll marry you out of hand,” the sailor said to her; but Rose answered, “No man alive’ll ever marry me after this night,” and she has kept her word. She has her trade, and it is a prosperous one, in which wages never fail. The children are warm and have no need to cry for hunger any more.

“It’s not a long life we live,” Rose says quietly. “My kind die early, but the children will be well along, an’ all the better when the time comes that they’ve full sense for not having to know what way the living comes. But let God Almighty judge who’s to blame most—I that was driven, or them that drove me to the pass I’m in.”

CHAPTER THIRD.

SOME METHODS OF A PROSPEROUS FIRM.

“The emancipation of women is certainly well under way, when all underwear can be bought more cheaply than it is possible to make it up at home, and simple suits of very good material make it hardly more difficult for a woman to clothe herself without thought or worry, than it has long been for a man.”

This was the word heard at a woman’s club not long ago, and reinforced within the week by two well-known journals edited in the interests of women at large. The editorial page of one held a fervid appeal for greater simplicity of dress and living in general, followed by half a column of entreaty to women to buy ready-made clothing, and thus save time for higher pursuits and the attainment of broader views. With feebler pipe, but in the same key, sounded the second advocate of simplification, adding:—

“Never was there a time when women could dress with as much real elegance on as small an expenditure of money. Bargains abound, and there is small excuse for dowdiness. The American woman is fast taking her place as the best-dressed woman in the civilized world.”

Believing very ardently that the right of every woman born includes not only “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but beauty also, it being one chief end of woman to include in her own personality all beauty attainable by reasonable means, I am in heartiest agreement with one side of the views quoted. But in this quest we have undertaken, and from which, once begun, there is no retreat, strange questions arise; and in this new dawn of larger liberty and wider outlook is seen the little cloud which, if no larger than a man’s hand, holds the seed of as wild a storm as has ever swept over humanity.

For emancipation on the one side has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other; and as one woman selects, well pleased, garment after garment, daintily tucked and trimmed and finished beyond any capacity of ordinary home sewing, marvelling a little that a few dollars can give such lavish return, there arises, from narrow attic and dark, foul basement, and crowded factory, the cry of the women whose life-blood is on these garments. Through burning, scorching days of summer; through marrow-piercing cold of winter, in hunger and rags, with white-faced children at their knees, crying for more bread, or, silent from long weakness, looking with blank eyes at the flying needle, these women toil on, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours even, before the fixed task is done. The slice of baker’s bread and the bowl of rank black tea, boiled to extract every possibility of strength, are taken, still at the machine. It is easier to sit there than in rising and movement to find what weariness is in every limb. There is always a child old enough to boil the kettle and run for a loaf of bread; and all share the tea, which gives a fictitious strength, laying thus the foundation for the fragile, anæmic faces and figures to be found among the workers in the bag-factories, paper-box manufactories, etc.

“Why don’t they go into the country?” is often asked. “Why do they starve in the city when good homes and ample pay are waiting for them?”

It is not with the class to whom this question is applicable that we deal to-day. Of the army of two hundred thousand who battle for bread, nearly a third have no resource but the needle, and of this third many thousands are widows with children, to whom they cling with a devotion as strong as wiser mothers feel, and who labor night and day to prevent the scattering into asylums, and consequent destruction of the family as a family. They are widows through many causes that can hardly be said to come under the head of “natural.” Drunkenness leads, and the thousand accidents that are born of drunkenness, but there are other methods arising from the same greed that underlies most modern civilization. The enormous proportion of accidents, which, if not killing instantly, imply long disability and often death as the final result, come nine tenths of the time from criminal disregard of any ordinary means of protecting machinery. One great corporation, owning thousands of miles of railroad, saw eight hundred men disabled in greater or less degree in one year, and still refused to adopt a method of coupling cars which would have saved the lives of the sixty-eight brakemen who were sacrificed to the instinct of economy dominating the superintendent. The same man refused to roof over a spot where a number of freight-handlers were employed during a stormy season, rheumatism and asthma being the consequences for many, and his reason had at least the merit of frankness,—a merit often lacking in explanations that, even when most plausible, cover as essential a brutality of nature.

“Men are cheaper than shingles,” he said. “There’s a dozen waiting to fill the place of one that drops out.”

In another case, in a great saw-mill, the owner had been urged to protect a lath-saw, swearing at the persistent request, even after the day when one of his best men was led out to the ambulance, his right hand hanging by a bit of skin, his death from lockjaw presently leaving one more widow to swell the number. It is of such men that a sturdy thinker wrote last year, “Man is a self-damnable animal,” and it is on such men that the curse of the worker lies heaviest. That they exist at all is hardly credited by the multitude who believe that, for this country at least, oppression and outrage are only names. That they exist in numbers will be instantly denied; yet to one who has heard the testimony given by weeping women, and confirmed by the reluctant admissions of employers themselves, there comes belief that no words can fully tell what wrong is still possible from man to man in this America, the hope of nations.

Is this a digression hardly to be pardoned in a paper on the trades and lives of women,—a deliberate turning toward an issue which has neither place nor right in such limits? On the contrary, it is all part of the same wretched story. The chain that binds humanity in one has not one set of links for men and another for women; and the blow aimed at one is felt also not only by those nearest, but by successive ranks to whom the shock, though only by indirect transmission, is none the less deadly in effect. And thus the wrong done on the huge scale appropriate to a great corporation finds its counterpart in a lesser but quite as well organized a wrong, born also of the spirit of greed, and working its will as pitilessly.

“If you employed on a large scale you would soon find that you ceased to look at your men as men,” said an impatient iron-worker not long ago. “They are simply so much producing power. I don’t propose to abuse them, but I’ve no time even to remember their faces, much less their names.”

Precisely on this principle reasons the employer of women, who are even less to be regarded as personalities than men. For the latter, once a year at least the employer becomes conscious of the fact that these masses of “so much producing power” are resolvable into votes, and on election day, if on no other, worthy of analysis. There is no such necessity in the case of women. The swarming crowd of applicants are absolutely at the mercy of the manager or foreman, who, unless there is a sudden pressure of work, makes the selections according to fancy, youth and any gleam of prettiness being unfailing recommendations. There are many firms of which this could not be said with any justice. There are many more in which it is the law, tacitly laid down, but none the less a fact. With such methods of selection go other methods supposed to be confined to the lowest grade of work and the lowest type of employer, both being referred to regions like Baxter or Division Streets. But they are to be found east or west indifferently, the illustration at present in mind being on Canal Street, within sound of Broadway. It is a prosperous firm, one whose trade-mark can be trusted; and here are a few of the methods by which this prosperity has been attained, and goes on in always-increasing ratio.

In the early years of their existence as a firm they manufactured on the premises, but, like many other firms, found that it was a very unnecessary expense. A roof over the heads of a hundred or more women, with space for their machines, meant not less than twenty-five hundred dollars a year to be deducted from the profits. Even floors in some cheaper quarter were still an expense to be avoided if possible. The easy way out of the difficulty was to make the women themselves pay the rent, not in any tangible imposition of tax, but none the less certainly in fact. Nothing could be simpler. Manufacturing on the premises had only to cease, and it could even be put as a favor to the women that they were allowed to work at home. The rule established itself at once, and the firm, smiling serenely at the stoppage of this most damaging and most unnecessary leak, proceeded to make fresh discoveries of equally satisfactory possibilities. To each woman who applied for work it was stated:—

“We send all packages from the cutting-room by express, the charges to be paid by you. It’s a small charge, only fifteen cents, to be paid when the bundle comes in.”

“We can come for ours. We live close by. We don’t want to lose the fifteen cents,” a few objected, but the answer was invariable:—

“It suits us best to make up the packages in the cutting-room, and if you don’t like the arrangement there are plenty waiting that it will suit well enough.”

Plenty waiting! How well they knew it, and always more and more as the ships came in, and the great tide of “producing power” flowed through Castle Garden, and stood, always at high-water mark, in the wards where cheap labor may be found. Plenty waiting; and these women who could not wait went home and turned over their small store of pennies for the fifteen cents, the payment of which meant either a little less bread or an hour or two longer at the sewing-machine, defined as the emancipator of women.

In the mean time the enterprising firm had made arrangements with a small express company to deliver the packages at twelve cents each, and could thus add to the weekly receipts a clear gain of three cents per head. It is unnecessary to add that they played into each other’s hands, and that the wagon-drivers had no knowledge of anything beyond the fact that they were to collect the fifteen cents and turn it over to their superiors. But in some manner it leaked out; and a driver whose feelings had been stirred by the sad face of a little widow on Sixth Street told her that the fifteen cents was “a gouge,” and they had all better put their heads together and refuse to pay more than twelve cents.

“If we had any heads, it might do to talk about putting them together,” the little widow said bitterly. “For my part, I begin to believe women are born fools, but I’ll see what I can do.”

This “seeing” involved earning a dollar or two less for the week, but the cheat seemed so despicable a one that indignation made her reckless, and she went to the woman who had first directed her to the firm and had been in its employ almost from the beginning.

“It’s like ’em; oh, yes, it’s like ’em!” she said, “but we’ve no time to spend in stirring up things, and you know well enough what would be the end of it if we did,—discharged, and somebody else getting our wages. You’d better not talk too much if you want to keep your place.”

“That isn’t any worse than the thread dodge,” another woman said. “I know from a clerk in the house where they buy their thread, that they charge us five cents a dozen more than it costs them, though they make a great point of giving it to us at cost and cheaper than we could buy it ourselves.”

“Why don’t you club together and buy, then?” the little widow asked, to hear again the formula, “And get your walking-ticket next day? We know a little better than that.”

A few weeks later a new system of payment forced each worker to sacrifice from half an hour to an hour of precious time, her only capital. Hitherto payments had been made at the desk when work was brought in, but now checks were given on a Bowery bank, and the women must walk over in heat and storm alike, and wait their turn in the long line on the benches. If paid by the week this would make little difference, as any loss of time would be the employers’, but this form of payment is practically abolished, piece-work done at home meaning the utmost amount of profit to the employer, every loss in time being paid by the workers themselves. When questioned as to why the check system of payment had been adopted by this and various other firms, the reply was simply:—

“It saves trouble. The bank has more time to count out money than we have.”

“But the women? Does it seem quite fair that they should be the losers?”

“Fair? Anything’s fair in business. You’d find that out if you undertook to do it.”

As the case then at present stands, for this firm, and for many which have adopted the same methods, the working-woman not only pays the rent that would be required for a factory, but gives them a profit on expressage, thread, time lost in going to bank, and often the price on a dozen of garments, payment for the dozen being deducted by many foremen if there is a flaw in one. This foreman becomes the scapegoat if unpleasant questions are asked by any whose investigation might bring discredit on the firm. In some cases they refuse positively to give any information, but in most, questions are answered with suspicious glibness, and if reference is made to any difficulties encountered by the women in their employ, they take instant refuge in the statement:—

“Oh, that was before the last foreman left. We discharged him as soon as we found out how he had served the women.”

“Do you see those goods?” another asked, pointing to a counter filled with piles of chemises. “How do you suppose we make a cent when you can buy a chemise like that for fifty cents? We don’t. The competition is ruining us, and we’re talking of giving up the business.”

“That’s so. It’s really more in charity to the women than anything else that we go on,” his partner remarked, with a look toward him which seemed to hold a million condensed winks. “That price is just ruin; that’s what it is.”

Undoubtedly, but not for the firm, as the following figures will show,—figures given by a competent forewoman in a large establishment where she had had eleven years’ experience: twenty-seven yards and three-quarters are required for one dozen chemises, the price paid for such cotton as is used in one selling at fifty cents being five cents per yard, or $1.40 for the whole amount; thirty yards of edging at 4½ cents a yard furnishes trimming for the dozen, at $1.35; and four two-hundred-yard spools of cotton are required, at twenty-five cents per dozen, or eight cents per dozen garments. The seamer who sews up and hems the bodies of the garments receives thirty cents a dozen, and the “maker”—this being the technical term for the more experienced worker who puts on band and sleeves—receives from ninety cents to one dollar a dozen, though at present the rates run from seventy-five to ninety cents. Our table, then, stands as follows:—

The chemise which sells at seven dollars per dozen has the additional value in quality of cloth and edging, the same price being paid the work-women, this price varying only in very slight degree till the excessively elaborate work demanded by special orders. One class of women in New York, whose trade has been a prosperous one since ever time began, pay often one hundred dollars a dozen for the garments, which are simply a mass of lace and cobweb cambric, tucked and puffed, and demanding the highest skill of the machine operator, who even in such case counts herself happy if she can make eight or nine dollars a week. And if any youth and comeliness remain to her, why need there be wonder if the question frame itself: “Why am I the maker of this thing, earning barest living, when, if I choose, I, too, can be buyer and wearer and live at ease?”

Wonder rather that one remains honest when the only thing that pays is vice.

For the garments of lowest grade to be found in the cheapest quarters of the city the price ranges from twenty-five to thirty cents, the maker receiving only thirty cents a dozen, and cloth, trimming, and thread being of the lowest quality. The profit in such case is wellnigh imperceptible; but for the class of employer who secures it, content to grovel in foul streets, and know no joy of living save the one delight of seeing the sordid gains roll up into hundreds of thousands, it is still profit, and he is content. As I write, an evening paper containing the advertisement of a leading dry-goods firm is placed before me, and I read: “Chemises, from 12½ cents up.” Here imagination stops. No list of cost prices within my reach tells me how this is practicable. But one thing is certain. Even here it is not the employer who loses; and if it is a question of but a third of a cent profit, be sure that that profit is on his side, never on the side of the worker.

CHAPTER FOURTH.

THE BARGAIN COUNTER.

The problem of the last chapter is, if not plain, at least far plainer than when it left the pen, and it has become possible to understand how the garment sold at twelve and a half cents may still afford its margin of profit. It has also been made plain that that profit is, as there stated, “never on the side of the worker,” but that it is wrung from her by the sharpest and most pitiless of all the methods known to unscrupulous men and the women who have chosen to emulate them. For it has been my evil fortune in this quest to find women not only as filled with greed and as tricky and uncertain in their methods as the worst class of male employers, but even more ingenious in specific modes of imposition. Without exception, so far as I can discover, they have been workers themselves, released for a time it may be by marriage, but taking up the trade again, either from choice or necessity. They have learned every possibility of cheating. They know also far better than men every possibility of nagging, and as they usually own a few machines they employ women on their own premises and keep a watchful eye lest the smallest advantage be gained. The majority prefer to act as “sweaters,” this releasing them from the uncertainties attending the wholesale manufacturer, and as the work is given to them at prices at or even below the “life limit,” it is not surprising that those to whom they in turn pass it on find their percentage to mean something much nearer death than life.

“Only blind eyes could have failed to see all this before,” some reader is certain to say. “How is it possible that any one dealing directly with the question could doubt for a moment the existence of this and a thousand-fold worse fraud?”

Only possible from the same fact that makes these papers a necessity. They hold only new phases of the old story. The grain has had not one threshing alone, but many, and yet for the most patient and persistent of searchers after truth is ever fresh surprise at its nature and extent. Given one or a dozen exposures of a fraud, and we settle instinctively into the conviction that its power has ended. It is barely conceivable to the honest mind that cheating has wonderful staying power, and that not one nor a thousand exposures will turn into straight paths feet used to crooked ones. And when a business man, born to all good things and owning a name known as the synonyme of the best the Republic offers to-day, states calmly, “There is no such thing as business without lying,” what room remains for honor or justice or humanity among men whose theory is the same, and who can gild it with no advantage of birth or training? It is a wonderful century, and we are civilizing with a speed that takes away the breath and dims the vision, but there are dark corners still, and in the shadow Greed and Corruption and Shame hold high carnival, with nameless shapes, before which even civilization cowers. Their trace is found at every turn, but we deal with only one to-day, helpless, even when face to face, to say what method will most surely mean destruction.

We settle so easily into the certainty that nothing can be as bad as it seems, that moments of despair come to all who would rouse men to action. Not one generation nor many can answer the call sounding forever in the ears of every son of man; but he who has heeded has at least made heeding more possible for those that follow; and the time comes at last when the way must be plain for all. To make it plainer many a popular conviction must be laid aside, and among them the one that follows.

It is a deeply rooted belief that the poor understand and feel for the poor beyond any possibility in those who have never known cold and hunger and rags save as uncomfortable terms used too freely by injudicious agitators. Like many another popular belief the groundwork is in the believer’s own mind, and has its most tangible existence in story-books. There are isolated cases always of self-sacrifice and compassion and all gentle virtues, but long experience goes to show that if too great comfort is deadening, too little is brutalizing, and that pity dies in the soul of man or woman to whom no pity has been shown. It is easy to see, then, how the woman who has found injustice and oppression the law of life, deals in the same fashion when her own time comes, and tyrannizes with the comfortable conviction that she is by this means getting even with the world. She knows every sore spot, and how best to make the galled jade wince, and lightens her own task by the methods practised in the past upon herself. This is one species to be dealt with, and a far less dangerous one than the craftier and less outspokenly brutal order, just above her in grade. It is by these last that some of the chief frauds on women are perpetrated, and here we find one source of the supplies that furnish the bargain counters.

We read periodically of firms detected in imposing upon women, and are likely to feel that such exposure has ended their career as firms once for all. In every trade will be found one or more of these, whose methods of obtaining hands are fraudulent, and who advertise for “girls to learn the trade,” with no intention of retaining them beyond the time in which they remain content to work without pay. There are a thousand methods of evasion, even when the law faces them and the victim has made formal complaint. As a rule she is too ignorant and too timid for complaint or anything but abject submission, and this fact is relied upon as certain foundation for success. But, if determined enough, the woman has some redress in her power. Within a few years, after long and often defeated attempts, the Woman’s Protective Union has brought about legislation against such fraud, and any employer deliberately withholding wages is liable to fifteen days’ imprisonment and the costs of the suit brought against him, a fact of which most of them seem to be still quite unaware. This law, so far as imprisonment is concerned, has no application to women, and they have learned how to evade the points which might be made to bear upon them, by hiring rooms, machines, etc., and swearing that they have no personal property that can be levied upon. Or, if they have any, they transfer it to some friend or relative, as in the case of Madame M——, a fashionable dressmaker notorious for escaping from payment seven times out of ten. She has accumulated money enough to become the owner of a large farm on Long Island, but so ingeniously have all her arrangements been made that it is impossible to make her responsible, and her case is used at the Union as a standing illustration of the difficulty of circumventing a woman bent upon cheating.

A firm, a large proportion of whose goods are manufactured in this manner, can well afford to stock the bargain counters of popular stores. They can afford also to lose slightly by work imperfectly done, though, even with learners, this is in smaller proportion than might be supposed. The girl who comes in answer to their advertisement is anxious to learn the trade at once, and gives her best intelligence to mastering every detail. Her first week is likely to hold an energy of effort that could hardly last, and she can often be beguiled by small payments and large promises to continue weeks and even months, always expecting the always delayed payment. Firms dealing in such fashion change their quarters often, unless in league with police captains who have been given sufficient reasons for obliviousness of their methods, and who have also been known to silence timid complaints with the threat of a charge of theft. But there is always a multitude ready to be duped, and no exposure seems sufficient to prevent this, and women who have once established a business on this system seem absolutely reckless as to any possible consequences.

There is at present on Third Avenue a Mrs. F——, who for eleven years has conducted a successful business built upon continuous fraud. She is a manufacturer of underwear, and the singular fact is that she has certain regular employees who have been with her from the beginning, and who, while apparently unconscious of her methods, are practically partners in the fraud. She is a woman of good presence and address, and one to whom girls submit unquestioningly, contending, even in court, that she never meant to cheat them; and it is still an open question with those who know her best how far she herself recognizes the fraud in her system. The old hands deny that it is her custom to cheat, and though innumerable complaints stand against her, she has usually paid on compulsion, and insisted that she always meant to. Her machines never lack operators, and the grade of work turned out is of the best quality. Her advertisement appears at irregular intervals, is answered by swarms of applicants, and there are always numbers waiting their turn. On a side street a few blocks distant is a deep basement, crowded with machines and presided over by a woman with many of her personal characteristics. It is the lowest order of slop work that is done here, but it helps to fill the bargain counters of the poorer stores, and the workers are an always shifting quantity. It is certain that both places are practically the property of Mrs. F——, but no man has yet been cunning enough to determine once for all her responsibility, and no law yet framed covers any ground that she has chosen as her own. Her prototypes are to be found in every trade open to women, and their numbers grow with the growth of the great city and strengthen in like proportion. The story of one is practically the story of all. Popularly supposed to be a method of trickery confined chiefly to Jews, investigation shows that Americans must share the odium in almost as great degree, and that the long list includes every nationality known to trade.

We have dealt thus far with fraud as the first and chief procurer for bargain counters. Another method results from a fact that thus far must sum up as mainly Jewish. Till within very little more than a year, a large dry-goods firm on the west side employed many women in its underwear department. The work was piece-work, and done by the class of women who own their own machines and work at home. Prices were never high, but the work was steady and the pay prompt. The firm for a time made a specialty of “Mother Hubbard” night-gowns, for which they paid one dollar a dozen for “making,” this word covering the making and putting in of yoke and sleeves, the “seamer” having in some cases made the bodies at thirty cents a dozen. Many of the women, however, made the entire garment at $1.30 per dozen, ten being the utmost number practicable in a day of fourteen hours. Suddenly the women were informed that their services would not be required longer. An east-side firm bearing a Jewish name had contracted to do the same work at eighty cents a dozen, and all other underwear in the same proportions. Steam had taken the place of foot-power, and the women must find employment with firms who were willing to keep to slower methods. Necessarily these are an always lessening minority. Competition in this race for wealth crushes out every possibility of thought for the worker save as so much producing power, and what hand and foot cannot do steam must. In several cases in this special manufacture the factories have been transferred to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where rent is a mere song, and where girls flock in from the adjacent country, eager for the work that represents something higher than either ordinary mill work or the household service they despise.

“What can we do?” said one manufacturer lately, when asked how he thought the thing would end. “If there were any power quicker than steam, or any way of managing so that women could feed five or six machines, that would have to come next, else every one of us would go to the wall together, the pressure is so tremendous. Of course there’s no chance for the women, but then you must remember there’s precious little chance for the employer either. This competition is a sort of insanity. It gluts the market with cheap goods, and gives a sense of prosperity, but it is the death of all legitimate, reasonable business. It won’t surprise me if this whole trade of manufacturing underwear becomes a monopoly, and one man—like O’H——, for instance—swallows up the whole thing. Lord help the women then, for there’ll be no help in man!”

“Suppose co-operation were tried? What would be the effect?”

“No effect, because there isn’t confidence enough anywhere to make men dare a co-operative scheme. Even the workers would distrust it, and a sharp business man laughs in your face if you mention the word. It doesn’t suit American notions. It might be a good thing if there were any old-fashioned business men left,—men content with slow profits and honest dealing,—as my father was, for instance. But he wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance to-day. The whole system of business is rotten, and there will have to be a reconstruction clean from the bottom, though it’s the men that need it first. We’re the maddest nation for money on the face of the earth, and the race is a more killing one every year. I’m half inclined to think sometimes that mankind will soon be pretty much a superfluity, the machines are getting so intelligent; and it may be these conditions that seem to upset you so are simply means of killing off those that are not wanted, and giving place to a less sensitive order of beings. Lord help them, I say again, for there’s no help in man.”

The speaker nodded, as if this rather unexpected flight of imagination was an inspiration in which might lie the real solution of all difficulties, and hurried away to his waiting niche in the great competitive system. And as he went, there came to me words spoken by one of the workers, in whose life hope was dead, and who also had her theory of any future under to-day’s conditions:—

“I’ve worked eleven years. I’ve tried five trades with my needle and machine. My shortest day has been fourteen hours, for I had the children and they had to be fed. There’s not one of these trades that I don’t know well. It isn’t work that I’ve any trouble in getting. It’s wages. Five years ago I could earn $1.50 a day, and we were comfortable. Then it began to go down,—$1.25, then $1.00. There it stopped awhile, and I got used to that, and could even get some remains of comfort out of it. I had to plan to the last half cent. We went cold often, but we were never hungry. But then it fell again,—to ninety cents, to eighty-five. For a year the best that I can do I have earned not over eighty cents a day,—sometimes only seventy-five. I’m sixty-two years old. I can’t learn new ways. I am strong. I always was strong. I run the machine fourteen hours a day, with just the stoppings that have to be to get the work ready. I’ve never asked a man alive for a penny beyond what my own hands can earn, and I don’t want it. I suppose the Lord knows what it all means. It’s His world and His children in it, and I’ve kept myself from going crazy many a time by saying it was His world and that somehow it must all come right in the end. But I don’t believe it any more. He’s forgotten. There’s nothing left but men that live to grind the face of the poor; that chuckle when they find a new way of making a cent or two more a week out of starving women and children. I never thought I should feel so; I don’t know myself; but I tell you I’m ready for murder when I think of these men. If there’s no justice above, it isn’t quite dead below; and if men with money will not heed, the men and the women without money will rise some day. How? I don’t know. We’ve no time to plan, and we’re too tired to think, but it’s coming somehow, and I’m not ashamed to say I’ll join in if I live to see it come. It’s seas of tears that these men sail on. It’s our life-blood they drink and our flesh that they eat. God help them if the storm comes, for there’ll be no help in man.”

Employer and employed had ended in wellnigh the same words; but the gulf between no words have spanned, and it widens day by day.

CHAPTER FIFTH.

A FASHIONABLE DRESSMAKER.

“Come now, be reasonable, won’t you? You’ve got to move on, you know, and why don’t you do it?”

“I’m that reasonable that a bench of judges couldn’t be more so; and I’ll not move on for anything less than dynamite, and I ain’t sure I would for that. It’s only a choice between starvation and going into the next world in little bits, and I don’t suppose it makes much difference which way it’s done.”

The small, pale, dogged-looking little woman who announced this conviction did not even rise from the steps where she sat looking up to the big policeman, who faced her uneasily, half turning as if he would escape the consequences of rash action if he knew how. Nothing could be more mysterious. For it was within sight of Broadway, on one of the best-known side streets near Union Square, where business signs were few and of the most decorous order, and where before one door, bearing the name of one of the best-known fashionable dressmakers, a line of carriages stood each day during the busy season. A name hardly less known was on the door-plate of the great house before which she sat, and which still bore every mark of prosperous ownership, while from one of the windows looked the elaborately dressed head of Madame herself, the anxiety in her eyes contradicting the scornful smile on her thin lips. The door just beyond No. — opened, and a stout gentleman descended one step and stood eying the policeman belligerently. That official looked up the street as if wishing for cry of “murder” or “stop thief” around the corner, but hearing neither, concentrated again on the antagonist whose irregular methods defied precedent and gave him a painful sense of insecurity. If two could listen, why not three?—and I paused near the steps, eyed considerately by the stout gentleman, who was evidently on the outlook for allies. A look of intelligence passed between Madame and the policeman, and her head disappeared from the window, a blind on the second story moving slightly and announcing a moment later that she had taken a less conspicuous post of observation.

“Move on now, I tell you!” began the policeman again, but paused, for as he spoke a slender, bright-eyed girl came swiftly toward them, and paused on the first step with a glance of curiosity at the little group.

“Have you come to answer Madame M——’s advertisement?” the little woman said, as she rose from the steps and laid her hand detainingly on the hurrying figure.

“Yes,” the girl answered hesitatingly, pulling away from the hand that held.

“Then, unless you’ve got anything else to do and like to give your time and strength for naught, keep away. You’ll get no wages, no matter what’s promised. I’ve been there six months, kept on by fair promises, and I know. I’ll let no girl go in there without warning.”

“It’s a good-looking place,” the girl said doubtfully.

“It’s a den of thieves all the same. If you don’t believe me, come down to the Woman’s Protective Union on Clinton Place, and you’ll see my case on the book there, and judgment against this woman, that’s no more mercy than a Hottentot and lies that smoothly that she’d humbug an angel of light. Ah! that’s good!” she added, for the girl had shaken off her hand and sped away as swiftly as she had come. “That’s seven since yesterday, and I wish it were seven hundred. It’s time somebody turned watchdog.”

“That ain’t your business. That’s a matter for the law,” said the big policeman, who had glanced anxiously up to the second-story window and then looked reassured and serene, as the stout gentleman made a significant movement, which indicated that bribery was as possible for one sex as for the other. “The law’ll straighten out anything that you’ve a mind to have it.”

“The law! Lord help them that think the law is going to see them through,” the small woman said, with a fierceness that made the big policeman start and lay his hand on his club. “What’s the law worth when it can’t give to you one dollar of two hundred and eight that’s owed; and she that earned them gasping her life out with consumption? If it was my account alone do you suppose I’d care? Mine’s eighty-five, and I went to law for it, to find she’d as long a head as she has smooth tongue, and had fixed things so that there wasn’t a stick of furniture nor a dollar of property that could be levied on. If she’d been a man the new law that gives a cheating employer fifteen days’ imprisonment might have worked with her as it’s worked with many a rascal that never knew he could be brought up with a round turn. But she’s a woman and she slides through, and a judgment against her isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. So as I can’t take it out in money I take it out in being even with her. There are the papers that show I don’t lie, and here I sit the time I’ve fixed to sit, and if she gets the three new hands she’s after, it won’t be because I haven’t done what came to me to do to hinder it.”

The policeman had moved away before the words ended, the stout gentleman having descended the steps for a moment, and stood in a position which rendered his little transaction feasible and almost invisible. He beckoned to me as the small woman sat down again on the steps, and I followed him into the vestibule.

“You’re interested, my dear madam,” he said. “You’re interested, and you ought to be. I’ve stayed home from business to make sure she wasn’t interfered with, and I’d do it again with the greatest pleasure. I’d like to post one like her before every establishment in New York where cheating goes on, and I’m going to see this thing through!”

There was no time for questions. My appointment must be kept, and with one pause to take the name and number of the small Nemesis I went my way. Three days later she sat there still, and on the following one, as the warm spring rain fell steadily, she kept her post, sheathed in a rubber cloak, and protected by an umbrella which, from its size and quality, I felt must be the stout gentleman’s. With Saturday night her self-imposed siege ended, and she marched away, leaving the enemy badly discomfited and much more disposed to consider the rights of the individual, if not of the worker in general. As Madame’s prices were never less than fifty dollars for the making of a suit, ranging from this to a hundred or more, and as her three children were still small and her husband an undiscoverable factor, it became an interesting question to know where she placed the profits which, even when lessened by non-paying customers, could never be anything but great. Madame, however, had been too keen even for the sharp-witted lawyer of the Protective Union, whose utmost efforts only disclosed the fact that she was the probable backer of a manufacturer whose factory and farm were on Long Island, and whose business capacity had till within a few years never insured him more than a bare living.

It is an old story, yet an always new one, and in this case Madame had quieted her conscience by providing a comfortable lunch for the workers and allowing them more space than is generally the portion in a busy establishment. Well housed and well fed through the day and paid at intervals enough to meet the demands of rent or board bill, it was easy to satisfy her hands by the promise of full and speedy settlement, and when this failed, to tell a pitiful tale of unpaid bills and conscienceless customers, who could not be forced. When these resources were exhausted discharge solved any further difficulties, and a new set came in, to undergo the same experience. In an establishment where honesty has any place, the wages are rather beyond the average, skirt-hands receiving from seven to nine dollars a week and waist-hands from ten to fifteen. In the case of stores this latter class make from eighteen to forty dollars per week, and often accumulate enough capital to start in business for themselves. But a skirt-hand like Mary M—— seldom passes on to anything higher, and counts herself well paid if her week of sixty hours brings her nine dollars, not daring to grumble seriously if it falls to seven or even six. On the east side the same work must be done for from four to six dollars a week, the latter sum being considered high pay. But the work is an advance upon factory work and has a better sound, the dressmaker’s assistant looking down upon the factory hand or even the seamstress as of an inferior order.

In time I learned the full story of the little woman, ordinarily reticent and shrinking, but brought by trouble and indignation to the fiercest protest against oppression. Born in a New-England village she had learned a milliner’s trade, to which she presently added dressmaking, and succeeded in making a fair living, till bitten by the desire to see larger life and share all the good that the city seems to offer the shut-in country life, she came to New York with her small savings, expecting to find work easily, and did so, going at once into a store where a friend was at work. Sanitary conditions were all bad. Her hall bedroom on a fourth floor and the close confinement all did their work, and a long illness wasted strength and savings. When recovery came her place had been filled; and she wandered from store to store seeking employment, doing such odd jobs as were found at intervals, and powerless to recover the lost ground.

“It was like heaven to me,” she said, “when my friend came back to the city and got me that place as skirt-hand at Madame M——’s. I was so far gone I had even thought of the river, and said to myself it might be the easiest way out. You can’t help but like Madame, for she’s smooth-tongued and easy, and praises your work, and she made me think I’d soon be advanced and get the place I ought to have. She paid regularly at first, and I began to pick up courage. It was over-hours always. Madame would come in smiling and say: ‘Ah, dear girls! What trouble! It is an order that must be finished so soon. Who will be kind and stay so leetle longer?’ Then we all stayed, and she’d have tea made and send it in, and sandwiches or something good, and they all said, ‘She’s an angel. You won’t find anybody like Madame.’ She was so plausible, too, that even when there was longer and longer time between the payments the girls didn’t blame her, but borrowed of one another and put off their landladies and managed all ways to save her feelings. Jenny G—— had been here longer than any of them, and she worshipped Madame and wouldn’t hear a word even when one or another complained. But Jenny’s feet were on the ground and she hadn’t a stitch of warm underclothes, and she took a cold in December, and by January it had tight hold of her. I went to Madame myself then, and begged her to pay Jenny if it wasn’t but a little, and she cried and said if she could only raise the money she would. She didn’t; and by and by I went again, and then she turned ugly. I looked at her dumfounded when she spoke her real mind and said if we didn’t like it we could leave; there were plenty of others. I wouldn’t believe my ears even, and said to myself she was worn out with trouble and couldn’t mean a word of it. I wanted money for myself, but I wouldn’t ask even for anybody but Jenny.

“Next day Madame brought her ten dollars of the two hundred and twenty she owed her, and Jenny got shoes; but it was too late. I knew it well, for I’d seen my sister go the same way. Quick consumption ain’t to be stopped with new shoes or anything but new lungs, and there’s no patent for them yet that ever I’ve heard of. She was going last night when I went round, and sure as you live I’m going to put her death in the paper myself. I’ve been saving my money off lunches to do it, and I’ll write it: ‘Murdered by a fashionable dressmaker on —— Street, in January, 1886, Jenny G——, age nineteen years and six months.’ Maybe they won’t put it in, but here it is, ready for any paper that’s got feeling enough to care whether sewing-girls are cheated and starved and killed, or whether they get what they’ve earned. I’ve got work at home now. It don’t matter so much to me; but I’m a committee to attend to this thing, and I’ll find out every fraud in New York that I can. I’ve got nine names now,—three of ’em regular fashionables on the west side, and six of ’em following their example hard as they can on the east; and a friend of mine has printed, in large letters, ‘Beware of’ at the head of a slip, and I add names as fast as I get them, and every girl that comes in my way I warn against them. Do much good? No. They’ll get all the girls they want, and more; but it’s some satisfaction to be able to say they are cheats, making a living out of the flesh and blood of their dupes, and I’ll say it till I die.”

Here stands the experience of one woman with fearlessness enough to protest and energy enough to have at last secured a tolerable living. The report, for such it may be considered, might be made of many more names than those upon her black list, or found on the books of the Union. Happily for the worker, they form but a small proportion of the long list of dressmakers who deal fairly. But the life of the ordinary hand who has not ability enough to rise is, like that of the great majority who depend on the needle, whether machine or hand, filled with hardship, uncertainty, overwork, under-pay. The large establishments have next to no dull season, but we deal in the present chapter only with private workers; and often, on the east side especially, where prices and wages are always at the lowest ebb, the girls who have used all their strength in overwork during the busy season of spring and fall must seek employment in cigar factories or in anything that offers in the intermediate time, the wages giving no margin for savings which might aid in tiding over such periods. The dressmaker herself is often a sufferer, conscienceless customers abounding, who pay for the work of one season only when anxious for that of the next. Often it is mere carelessness,—the recklessness which seems to make up the method of many women where money obligations are concerned; but often also they pass deliberately from one dressmaker to another, knowing that New York holds enough to provide for the lifetime of the most exacting customer. There is small redress for these cases, and the dressmaker probably argues the matter for herself and decides that she has every right, being cheated, to balance the scale by a little of the same order on her own account.

A final form of rascality referred to in a previous chapter is found here, as in every phase of the clothing trade, whether on small or large scale. Girls are advertised for “to learn the trade,” and the usual army of applicants appear, those who are selected being told that the first week or two will be without wages, and only the best workers will be kept. Each girl is thus on her mettle, and works beyond her strength and beyond any fair average, to find herself discharged at the end of the time and replaced by an equally eager and equally credulous substitute. There are other methods of fraud that will find place in a consideration of phases of the same work in the great establishments, some difficulties of the employer being reserved for the same occasion.

CHAPTER SIXTH.

MORE METHODS OF PROSPEROUS FIRMS.

To do justice to employer as well as employed is the avowed object of our search, yet as it goes on, and the methods made necessary by competition become more and more clear, it is evident that back of every individual case of wrong and oppression lies a deeper wrong and a more systematized oppression. Master and servant alike are in the same bonds, and the employer is driven as mercilessly as he drives. He may deny it. He may even be quite unconscious of his own subjection, or, if he thinks at all of its extent, may look enviously at the man or the corporation that has had power to enslave him. The monopolist governs not only the market but the bodies and souls of all who provide wares for that market; yet the fascination of such power is so tremendous that to stand side by side with him is the dream of every young merchant,—the goal on which his eyes are set from the beginning. Only in like power is any satisfaction to be found. Any result below this high-water mark can be counted little else than failure.

To this end, then, toils the employer of every grade, bringing every faculty to bear on the lessening of waste, whether in material or time; the conservation of every force working in line with his purpose. Naturally, the same effect is produced as that mentioned in a previous paper. The employees come to represent “so much producing power,” and are driven at full speed or shut off suddenly like the machines of which they are the necessary but still more or less accidental associates. Certain formulas are used, evolved apparently from experience, and carrying with them an assurance of so much grieved but inevitable conviction that it is difficult to penetrate below the surface and realize that, while in degree true, they are in greater degree false. In various establishments, large and small, beginning with one the pay-roll of which carries 1,462 employees, and ending with one having hardly a third this number, the business manager made invariably the same statement: “We make our money from incidentals rather than from any given department. You are asking particularly about suits. I suppose you’ll think it incredible, but in suits we work at a dead loss. It is only an accommodation to our customers that makes us keep that department open. The work should be put out to mean any profit, but we can’t do that with the choicest materials, and so we make it up in other directions. You would have to go into business yourself to understand just how we are driven.”

“Suppose you refused to be driven? A firm of your standing must have matters a good deal in its own hands. Suppose—”

“Suppose!” The manager threw out his hands in a gesture more full of disclaimer than any words. “There is no room for supposes in business, madam. We do what we must. How are we to compete with a factory turning out suits by steam power? Not that we would compete. There is really no occasion,” he added hastily. “But their methods certainly have an unpleasant influence, and we are obliged to take them into account slightly.”

“Then your statement would be, that no matter how expensive the suit made up, you can make no profit on it?”

“Absolutely none. It is a concession to a customer’s whims. We could buy the same thing and sell to her at half the price, but she prefers to select materials and have them put together in our work-room, and we must humor her. But rents are so enormous that the space for every woman employed by us in these departments may be said to represent simply so many cubic feet in good coin, bringing us no return. Our profits are dwindling with every year.”

“Might not co-operation—”

Again the manager threw out his hands.

“Simply another form of robbery. We have investigated the history of co-operation, and it does not appear to affiliate with our institutions. The lamentable failure of the Co-operative Dress Association ought to be the answer to that suggestion. No, madam. There is no profit in suits, or in any form of made-up clothing for ladies’ wear, if it is done on the premises. You have to turn it over to the wholesale manufacturer if you want profit.”

Having heard this statement in many forms, and recognizing the fact that increase in rents as well as in systematized competition might well have reduced profits, it still appeared incredible that the rates charged held no surplus for the firm. Little by little it has become possible to supplement each statement by others of a different order. Nothing is more difficult than to obtain trustworthy information regarding the methods of a firm whose standing is such that to have served it is always a passport to other employment; whose payments are regular, and where every detail of work-room is beyond criticism. It is no question of bare-faced robbery as in that of many cited, yet even here the old story tells itself in different form, and with an element which, in many a less pretentious establishment, has not yet been found to exist.

The work done here is piece-work. French cutters and fitters, receiving from thirty to fifty dollars a week, give that guarantee of style and elegance which is inherent in everything bearing the stamp of the firm. Experts run the machines in the sewing-machine room, being paid by the day at the rate of from six to eight dollars per week in the busy season. The buttonholes are made by women who do nothing else, and who are paid by the dozen, earning from five to seven dollars weekly. All stitched seams are done in the machine-room, and the dress passes from there to the sewing-room, into the hands of the sewing-girls, who receive from three to four dollars and a half for each garment. The latter price is seldom reached; four dollars and a half or five dollars paying for a dress loaded with trimming, puffs, flounces, etc.

At this rate there would seem to be a chance for wages a good deal beyond the average, but it is one of the unwritten laws that no sewing-girl shall exceed five dollars per week; whether formulated by superintendent or by firm remains yet to be discovered. The one unquestionable fact is that if the superintendent of the work-room finds that any girl is expert enough to make over this amount the price per garment is docked, to bring her down to the level. They are never driven. On the contrary, they must wait often, two or three hours at times, for the arrival of “Madame,” who must inspect the work, drape a skirt, or give some suggestion as to trimming. No entreaty can induce the superintendent to give out another piece of work which might fill this vacant time, and the girls dare not state their case to the employer. No member of the firm enters the work-rooms. Reports are made by the superintendent of the department, and the firm remains content with knowing that it has provided every comfort for its employees. Complaint would insure discharge, and if a girl hints that she cannot live on five dollars a week the answer has been for the years during which the present superintendent has held the place, always the same:—

“If you haven’t a home so that you have no expense of board, it is your own fault, and I can’t be expected to do anything about it.”

There appears to be no question as to the entire “respectability” of the woman, who would undoubtedly deny the implication contained in her own words. But there is rivalry between the superintendents as to which department shall make largest returns in profits, and wages are kept down to secure that end. There is also no question that a proportion of those employed are “supported,” and merely add this work as a means of securing a little more pin-money. It is true of but a very few, but of those few an undeniable fact. It is equally a fact that, in spite of the managers’ assertions, profit can be made and is made from this department, and that a large percentage of such profit comes directly from the pocket of the sewing-girl, who, even when she adds buttonhole-making in the simpler dresses, can never pass beyond a fixed wage.

In other large establishments on both sides of the city methods are much the same, with merely slight variations as to comfort of quarters, time for lunch, sanitary conditions, etc. But in all alike, the indispensable, but always very helpless, sewing-girl appears to be one of the chief sources of profit, and to have small capacity and no opportunity for improving her condition. Even where the work comes from the manufactory, and steam has taken the place of foot-power, no machine has yet been run so automatically that the human hand can be entirely dispensed with. The “finisher” remains a necessity, and as finisher sometimes passes slightly beyond the rate obtained when merely sewing-girl. Only slightly, however. It is a deeply rooted conviction among these workers that a tacit or even, it may be, formal understanding has been settled upon by employers in general.

“I don’t know how it is,” said one of the most intelligent among the many I have talked with; “there’s never any trouble about getting work. I’ve even had them send after me when I had gone somewhere else in hopes of doing better. I used to earn ten and twelve dollars a week on suits, children’s or ladies’, but now if I earn five or sometimes six I do well. The work goes on with a rush. It’s a whole building except the first floor,—five stories, and suits of every kind. The rooms are all crowded, and they give out piece-work, but they’ve managed it so that we all earn about alike. When the rush of the fall and spring season is over they do white work and flannel skirts and such things, and a great many are discharged in the lull. But go where you will, up-town or down, it doesn’t seem to matter how well you can turn off the work or how long you have been at it. They all say, if we ask for better pay, ‘It can’t be had as long as there is such competition. We’re losing straight ahead.’ I don’t understand. We don’t any of us understand, because here is the great rush of work and it must be done. They can’t do without us, and yet they are grinding us down so that I get half distracted sometimes, wondering where it will end and if things will ever be better.”

“Would not private sewing be better? There is always a demand for good seamstresses.”

“I don’t know anything about private sewing. You have to cut and plan, and I never learned that. I like to work on things that are cut by a cutter and just so, and I can make up my dozen after dozen with not an eighth of an inch difference in my measurements. I’m an expert, you know.”

“But if you learned to do private sewing perfectly you could earn a dollar and a quarter a day and board and have your evening quite free.”

The girl shook her head. “I’ve had that said to me before, but you know it’s more independent as I am. Maybe things will be better by and by.”

There is no obstinacy like the obstinacy of deep-seated prejudice, and this exists to a bewildering degree among these workers, who, for some inscrutable reason, seem filled with the conviction that private employ of any nature whatever is inevitably a despotism filled with unknown horrors. There appears to be also a certain esprit du corps that holds sustaining power. The girl likes to speak of herself as one of such and such a firm’s hands, and to regard this distinction as compensation for over-hours and under-pay and all known wretchedness encompassing her trade. The speaker I have quoted was an American girl of twenty-six, had had three years in public schools, and regarded the city as the only place in which life could be considered endurable.

“I shouldn’t know what to do in the country if I were there,” she said. “I don’t seem to like it somehow. It isn’t the company, for mother and me keep to ourselves a good deal, but somehow we know how to get along in the city, and the country scares me. I like my work if only I could get more pay for it.”

“Do you ever think that if all who work in your line joined together and made common cause you might even things a little; that it might be easier for all of you?”

“We wouldn’t dare,” she answered, aghast. “Why, do you know, there’d be ten for each one of us that was turned off. Women come there by the hundred. That’s what they say to me in our firm: ‘What’s the use of fussing when here are dozens waiting to take your place?’ There isn’t any use. They say now that it is the dull season, and they’ve put our room on flannel skirts; two tucks and a hem, and a muslin yoke that has to be gone round four times with the stitching. One day I made ten, but nine is all one can do without nearly killing themselves, and they pay us one dollar a dozen for making them. It used to be a dollar and a half, and that was fair enough. It’s the kind of work I like. I shouldn’t be content to do any other; but it’s bringing us all down to starvation point, and I think something ought to be done.”

In a case like this, and it is the type of many hundreds of skilled workers, who regard their calling with a certain pride, and could by no possibility be induced to seek other lines of work or other methods of living, there seems little to be accomplished. They are, however, but a small portion of the army who wait for some deliverance, and who, if they had been born to a trifle more common sense, would turn in the one sole direction from which relief is certain, this relief and the reasons for and against it having no place at this stage of the investigation.

CHAPTER SEVENTH.

NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE GOSPEL.

From the fig-leaf down, it would seem as if a portion of the original curse accompanying it had passed on to each variation or amplification of first methods, its heaviest weight falling always on the weak shoulders that, if endurance could make strong, should belong to-day to a race of giants. Of the ninety and more trades now open to women, thirty-eight involve some phase of this question of clothing, about which centre some of the worst wrongs of modern civilization. It is work that has legitimate place. It must be done by some one, since the exigencies of this same civilization have abolished old methods and made home manufactures seem a poor and most unsatisfactory substitute for the dainty stitching and ornamentation of the cheaper shop-work. It is work that many women love, and, if living wages could be had, would do contentedly from year to year. Of their ignorance and blindness, and the mysterious possession they call pride, and the many stupidities on which their small lives are founded, there is much to be said, when these papers have done their first and most essential work of showing conditions as they are;—as they are, and not as the disciples of laissez faire would have us to believe they are.

“It is the business of these philanthropists to raise a hue and cry; to exaggerate every evil and underrate every good. They are not to be trusted. Look at our institutions and see what we are doing for the poor. Study statistics and see how comfortable they are!”

This is the word of a recent correspondent of a Podsnapian turn of mind, who proceeded to present facts and figures bearing out his theory. And on a Sunday shortly after, he was confirmed in his faith and greatly strengthened and comforted by words from a popular preacher, long owner of a popular pulpit, who, standing there as the representative of a master whose message was to the poor, and who turned to them from the beginning, as the hearers who alone could know most truly what meaning the message bore, spoke these words:—

“Moreover, all this hue and cry about so much destitution and misery and the unscrupulous greed of employers is groundless. I am convinced that more than one half—yes, fully three quarters—of the pauperism of which you heard so much in the late campaign exists only in the minds of the Georgeites. The picture drawn of New York’s misery is over-colored, and its inspiration is in the distorted imaginations of the George fanatics.... The rum-holes are the cause of all the misery.... I have been watching for thirty-five years, and in all my investigations among the poor I never yet found a family borne down by poverty that did not owe its fall to rum.”

This most extraordinary statement, from a man who in one year alone could not have listened to even half the appeals for help likely to have come to him in his position, without discovering that death and disaster in many forms played, if not the chief part, certainly that next in order to rum, can be accounted for only on the ground that a hobby ridden too hard has been known to bear off at the same time both the common-sense and power of judgment of the rider. Prohibition appears to him, as to many another, the only solution; the gospel of negation the only gospel for rich or poor. Since the Church first began to misinterpret the words of its Founder, since men who built hospitals first made the poor to fill them, the “thou shalt not” of the priest has stood in the way of a human development that, if allowed free play, had long ago made its own code, and found in natural spiritual law the key to the overcoming of that formulated by men to whom the divine in man was forever unrecognized and unrecognizable.

This is no place for the discussion of what, to many good men and women, seems the only safety for human kind; but to one who studies the question somewhat at least with the eyes of the physician, it becomes certain that no “thou shalt not” will ever give birth to either conscience or love of goodness and purity and decent living, or any other good that man must know; and that till the Church learns this, her hold on men and women will lessen, year by year. Every fresh institution in the miles of asylums and hospitals that cover the islands of the East River, and stretch on farther and farther with every year, is an added disgrace, an added count in the indictment against modern civilization. There are moments when the student of social conditions abhors Philanthropy; when a disaster that would wipe out at one stroke every institution the city treasures would seem a gift straight from God, if only thereby the scales might fall from men’s eyes, and they might learn that hiding foulness in an asylum is not extirpation; that something deeper and stronger than Philanthropy must work, before men can be saved.

It is as student, not as professional philanthropist, that I write; and the years that have brought experience have brought also a conviction, sharpened by every fresh series of facts, that no words, no matter what fire of fervor may lie behind, can make plain the sorrow of the poor. To ears that will hear, to souls that seek forever some way that may help in truth and not in name, even to them it loses power at moments. To souls that sit at ease and leave to “the power that works for righteousness” the evolution of humanity from its prison of poverty and ignorance and pain, it is quite useless to speak. They have their theory, and the present civilization contents them. But for the men and women who are neither Georgeites merely, nor philanthropists merely, nor certain that any sect or creed or ism will help, but who know that the foulest man is still brother, and the wretchedest, weakest woman still sister, whose shame and sorrow not only bear a poison that taints all civilization, but are forever our shame and our sorrow till the world is made clean,—for these men and women I write, not what I fancy, but what I see and know.

Most happily for humanity, they are stronger, more numerous, with every year; but the hardest fact for them remains ever that their battle is a double one, and that, exhausted as they may be with long conflict against lowest forms of evil, they must rally to a sharper one against the army of the Philistines. Strong soul and high endeavor: never since time began has man more needed them; never was there harder work to do.

The story of the working-woman in one great city is, with slight variations in conditions, the story of the working-woman in all; and when we have once settled conclusively what monopoly or competition has done and is doing for New York, we know sufficiently well what Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago and all the host of lesser cities could easily tell us in detail. With the mass of poor who work chiefly to obtain money for drink, and who, with their progeny, are filling the institutions in which we delight, we have absolutely nothing to do. It is seldom from their ranks that workers are recruited. A small proportion, rescued by societies or mission schools, may be numbered among them, but the greater part are a grade above, and while perhaps wellnigh as ignorant, have an inheritance of better instincts, and could under any reasonable conditions of living find their fate by no means intolerable.

I have chosen to-day, instead of passing on to another form of the clothing trade, to return to that of underwear, and this because it is the record most crowded with cases in which the subjects could not enter household service and have not been reduced to poverty by intemperance. Nor is the selection made with a view to working up as startling a case as possible. On the contrary, it has been made almost at random from the many recorded, any separate mention of which would be impossible in the space at command. First on the long list comes Catherine E——, an “expert” in underwear, and living on the top floor of a large, old-fashioned house in Clinton Place; the lower part stores and offices, the upper a tenement. She earned three years ago $1.50 a day; at times, $1.75. The same work now brings her eighty-five cents, and now and then but seventy-five. The husband was a “boss painter,” and they were comfortable, even prosperous, till the fate of his calling came upon him, and first the “drop hand,” and later blood-poisoning and heart-disease followed. He is just enough alive to care a little for the children and to oversee the pitiful household affairs; the oldest girl, a child of seven, doing the marketing, boiling the kettle, etc., and this season going to school. They are fair-faced, gentle children, and this is their mother’s story:—

“I can run the machine, and I did with every one of them when they were two weeks old, for I’ve always been strong. Nothing that happens is bad enough to kill me, and it’s lucky it’s so, for it’s two years and over since William there could earn a dollar. He helps me; but you see for yourself he’s half dead and no getting well, because we’ve nothing to buy food with, or medicine, or anything that could help him. We were both brought up here in the city. We don’t know anything about the country, but sometimes I wish we did, and that I could take the children and live somehow. But I don’t know how people live there. I’m certain of work here, and I’d be afraid to go anywhere else. I’m making babies’ slips now; three tucks and a hem and find your own cotton, and it takes eighteen hours to make a dozen, and these are seventy-five cents a dozen. I can buy cotton at eighteen cents a dozen, but we have to take it from the manufacturer at twenty cents—sometimes twenty-five cents. Last week I was on corset-covers; I take whatever they send up, for I’m an old hand, and always sure of work. They were plain corset-covers, and I got forty cents a dozen without the buttonholes. If I did them it would be five cents on every dozen, and sometimes I do. That pile in the corner is extra-size chemises. I get $1.50 a dozen for making them, and if I cord the bands, fifty cents a dozen for them. I can do seven or eight a day; but there are no more just now, they say. I work fourteen hours a day; yes, I’ve often worked sixteen, for you see there are six of us, and we must be clothed and fed. William is handy, but, poor soul! he’s only a man, and he’s sick past cure, and nobody but me for us all. God help us! I wouldn’t mind if wages were steady, but they cut and cut, and always some excuse for making them lower, and here am I, that can do anything, private orders and all, down to eighty-five cents a day. I could earn more by family sewing, but I can’t leave William or the children, for he’s likely to go any minute, the doctors say, if he over-exerts himself; and suppose it came, and I not here, and the baby and Willie and all! I’ve turned all ways. I think and think as I sit here, and there’s no help in God or man. It’s all wrong somehow, but we don’t know why nor how, and the only way I can see is just to die. There’s no place for honesty or hard work. You must lie and cheat if you want standing room. God help us!—if there is a God; but I’ve my doubts. Why don’t he help, if there is one?”

Here the average earnings were twenty-five dollars a month, the rent of the room they occupied seven dollars, leaving eighteen dollars for food, fire, light, and clothing.

Another disabled husband, recovering, but for many months unable to work, was found in a tenement-house in East Eleventh Street. In this case work and earnings were almost identical with the last, but there were but two children, and thus less demand for food, etc. For a year and a half the wife, though also an “expert,” had never exceeded eighty-five cents a day and had sometimes fallen as low as seventy. She had sometimes gone to the factory instead of working at home, and the last firm employing her in this way had charged ten cents on the dollar for the steam used in running the machine which she operated.

“It didn’t pay,” the little woman said, with a laugh that ended as a sob, checked instantly. “I could earn eight dollars a week, but there was the steam, ten cents on the dollar, and my car fares, for there was no time to walk,—sixty cents for them,—$1.40, you see, altogether. I might as well work at home and have the comfort of seeing that the children were all right. There’s plenty of work, it seems. It’s wages that’s the trouble, and do you know how they cut them? If I could work any other way I would, but I like to sew, and I don’t know any other trade. I’m not strong, but somehow I can run the machines, and there’s nothing else. But we’re clean discouraged. It isn’t living, and we don’t know what way to turn.”

In East Sixth Street, near the Bowery, Mrs. W., a widow still young and with a nervously energetic face and manner, gave her experience. She had been forewoman in a factory before her husband’s death, having supported him through his last year of life, working all day and nursing him at night. In this way her own health broke down, and she was at last taken to the hospital, where she remained nearly six months, coming out to find her place filled, but a subordinate one open to her.

“I had to wait for that,” she said, “and I had to learn. I knew a sewing-machine place where often you could get ruffling for skirts to do, and I went up there one morning. It was the three tucks and a hem ruffling, and I did one hundred and forty-two yards from eight in the morning till half-past four, and they paid me twenty-three cents. ‘We could get it done for that by steam power,’ they said, ‘so we can’t give more. It’s a favor anyway to give it out at all.’ That was my first day’s work. The next I went down to my place on Canal Street. They think a good deal of me there, and they put me on drawers right away; thirty-five cents a dozen for making them. I can make two dozen a day sometimes, but fine ones not over a dozen, though they pay fifty cents. You wonder how they make anything. I’ve been forewoman, and I know the prices. Why, even at forty cents a pair they make on them. Twenty-one yards of cloth at five cents makes a dozen; that’s $1.05; and eighteen yards of edge at four and a half cents, that’s eighty-one cents; and the making thirty-five cents; that’s $2.21. Thread and all, they won’t cost over $2.25, and they sell at wholesale at three dollars a dozen and retail at $4.80. There’s profit even when you think a cent couldn’t be made. Take skirts, three yards of cloth in each at six cents. They pay thirty cents a dozen for tucking, twenty-five cents a dozen for ruffling, and thirty cents for seaming,—eighty-five cents a dozen for the entire skirt; and the cloth makes it, at eighteen cents apiece, $3.01 for the dozen. Those skirts retail at sixty cents apiece, and wholesale at fifty cents. There’s profit on them all, no matter what they say, for I’ve figured every penny over and over, down to the tape and thread. But they swear to you they are ruined by competition, and so the wages go down and down and down. Leave the city? I don’t know how to live anywhere else. I’ve never learned. It’s something to be sure of your work, even if it is starvation wages. But there’s distress all around me. I don’t see what it means. There’s a girl in the room next to me, with an invalid mother. She does flannel shirts, but before she got them she nearly starved on underwear. Now she earns a dollar a day, but she works fourteen hours for it, seven cents an hour. That’s nice pay in a Christian land. Christian! Bah! I used to believe there was Christianity, but I’ve given it up, like many another. There’s just one religion left, and that is the worship of money. The Golden Calf is God, and every man sells his soul for a chance to bow to it. I don’t know but what I would myself. So far I’ve kept decent; I came of decent folks; but it’s no fault of many a man that I’ve worked for that I can say so still. I’ve had to leave three places because they wouldn’t let me alone, and I stay where I am now because they’re quiet, respectable people, and no outrageousness. But if you know what it all means I wish you’d tell me, for I’m dazed, and I can’t make out the reason of anything any more.”

In the same house a widow with three children,—the father killed by falling from a scaffolding,—earns sixty cents a day by making buttonholes, and above her is another well past sixty, whose trade and wages are the same. How they live, what they can wear, how they are fed, on this amount is yet to be told, but every detail waits; and having gathered them from these and other women in like case, I am not yet prepared to believe that they live at ease, or that the “hue and cry about so much destitution and misery, and the unscrupulous greed of employers, is groundless.”

CHAPTER EIGHTH.

THE TRUE STORY OF LOTTE BAUER.

It was the Prussian War that seemed to settle the question. So far as Grossvater Bauer himself was concerned, he would still have toiled on contentedly. To be alive at all on German soil was more than honor or wealth or any good thing that the emigrant might report as part of his possession in that America to which all discontented eyes looked longingly. The reports might all be true; yet why should one for the sake of better food or more money be banished from the Vaterland and have only a President, a man of the people, in place of the old Kaiser, whose very name thrilled the heart, and for whose glory Grossvater Bauer would have given many sons? He had given them. Peace had come, and France was paying tribute; and, one by one, the few who had escaped French bullets came home to the little Prussian village and told their tales of the siege and of the three who had fallen at Sedan. Grossvater Bauer sat silent. He had been as silent when they brought the news to him in the beginning. It was the fortune of war. He had served his own time, and having served it, accepted as part of his birthright the same necessity for his sons. They had worked side by side with him on the great farm where he had been for most of his life head laborer and almost master; worked contentedly until Annchen, the oldest daughter, had married a tailor, dissatisfied like all tailors, and set sail for the strange country where fortune had always open hands for all the world. He had prospered, and in Annchen’s letters, coming at rare intervals, was always an appeal to them to come over. The boys listened; doubtfully at first, for the father’s faith was strong in them that no land could ever hold the same good as this land through which the Rhine flowed to the sea. But as the time came when they must enter the army there was rebellion. Here and there, in the air it seemed, for no one could say from whence the new feeling had come, were questions the sound of which was not to be tolerated by any true Prussian. Why should this great army live on the toil of the peasant? Why should the maintenance of these conscripts swallow up every possible saving in the wages and be the largest item save one in the year’s expenses? Why should there be a standing army at all?

Hans, when his time came, had learned to ask, but he had not learned to answer. The splendor of his uniform appeared to be in some sort a reply, and its tightness may also have had its effect in restricting his mental operations. For three years the carefully kept accounts of Grossvater Bauer held the item: “Maintenance of son in army, $121.37.” Then Hans came home and married Lieschen, the little dairy-maid, and in due time Lotte’s blue eyes opened on the world whose mysteries were still not quite explicable to the heavy father. Wilhelm and Franz had taken their turn, and in spite of questions settled passively at last into the farm life. Then came the war,—the war that called for every man with strength to carry a gun,—and when it was over Lotte was fatherless, and there were no more sons to bear the name, or to trouble Grossvater Bauer’s mind with further questions.

Very glorious, but what use if there were no boys left to whom the story could be told? If he had yielded, if even one had crossed the sea, there would be something still to live for. But Lieschen had given them no boys. He thought of it day after day, till the familiar fields grew hateful and he wished only to escape from the land to which he had paid a tax too heavy for mortal endurance. There was no one but Lieschen and her little ones, Lotte first of all and best beloved, and in another month they had set sail and the old life was over.

“Work for all, homes for all, plenty for all,” Annchen had written how many times. Yet now, when the Grossvater appeared, and the round-eyed Lieschen and her tribe of five, Peter shook his head. He had prospered, it is true. From journeyman tailor he had become master on a small scale, and packed himself and his men into a shop so tiny that it was miraculous how elbow-room remained to use the goose. But work for the Grossvater was quite another thing. He had no trade, and while his capacity as farmer on scientific methods ought to give him paying employment in the country, the city held nothing for him. Work for Lieschen and Lotte was easy. A week or two of apprenticeship would teach them all that need be known to do the work on cheap coats or pantaloons, but even for them it was certain that the country would be better.

It was here that Grossvater Bauer developed unexpected obstinacy. He had a little money. He was still strong and in good case. Here was this great city which must have work of some nature, and which, so far from weighing upon him as Lotte had feared, seemed to have for him a curious fascination. He haunted the wharves. The smell of the sea and the tarred ropes of the ships bewitched him, and on the wharves he soon found work, and loaded and unloaded all day contentedly, with a feeling that this was after all more like living than anything could have been in the home fields where only the ghosts of his own remained to have place at his side.

It is now only that the story of Lotte begins,—Lotte, who pined for the great farm and the fields across which the wind swept, and the cows she had named and cared for. Her mother forgot, or did not care. She had never loved her work, and liked better to chatter with the other women in the house, or even to run the machine hour after hour, than to milk, or feed the cattle, or churn. Lotte hated the machine. Her back ached, her eyes burned, and her head throbbed after only an hour or two of it. “Let me take a place,” she begged, but the Grossvater shook his head angrily. This was a free country. There was no need that she should serve. Let her learn to be contented and thankful that she could earn so much. For with their simple habits the wages paid in 1881 seemed wealth. Forty-five cents a pair, three of which she could make in a day, brought the week’s earnings to eight dollars, sometimes to nine dollars, and Peter prophesied that it might even be ten or twelve dollars. Lieschen had as much. Down on the wharves the Grossvater earned sometimes eighteen dollars a week. It was a fortune. At home, in the best of times, with sons and daughters all at work, his books, which he kept always with the accuracy of a merchant, showed something under $1,000 a year as receipts, the expenses hardly varying from the $736.28 which represented the maintenance of the family during Hans’s first year as soldier. Their food ration at home had been nine and a half cents daily. Wheat bread had stood for festivals and high days. Black bread, cabbage soup, beer, cheese, and sausage, with meat on Sundays, had been their only ambition as to food, and here Grossvater Bauer insisted upon the same regimen, and frowned as one by one the fashions of the new country crept in. Peter had been right after all. One must work, it is true, but no harder and no longer, and the return was double. The little iron chest which had held the savings at home held them here, and at rare intervals the Grossvater allowed Lotte to look, and said as he turned over the shining coins, “Thou wilt have most, my Lottchen. It is for thee that I put them away.”

“There is enough for a little farm,” Lotte said one day. “We could go on this Long Island and have land, and not be shut all day in these dark rooms.”

“That is slower,” the Grossvater said. “We will go back with much money when it is earned, and I shall be owner, and thou, Lotte, the mistress, and Franz maybe will go also.”

Lotte shook her head, though her cheeks were pink.

“Franz cares only for America,” she said. “Come with us some day, Grossvater, and let us look at the little house he knows. There is land, two acres, and a barn and a cow, and all for so little. I could be stronger then.”

“That is folly,” the old man said angrily. “It would be but shillings there, where here it is dollars. Wait and you will see.”

Lotte looked after him wonderingly as he turned away. To save was becoming his passion. He grudged her even her shoes and the dress she must have, though no one had so little. Peter revolted openly and came less and less. Lieschen cried, but still looked at the week’s wages as compensation for many evils, and Lotte worked on, the pink spot fixing itself on her cheeks, and her blue eyes growing sadder with every week. Franz, the son of their old neighbor at home, hated this crowded city as she did, and urged her to take her chances and marry him, even if, as yet, he was only laborer in the market gardens out on the Island. There were minutes when Lotte nearly yielded, but the Grossvater seemed to hold her as with chains. She loved him, and she had always submitted. Perhaps in time he would yield and learn again to care for the old life of the country.

At last a change came, but there was in it no release, only closer imprisonment. Peter and Annchen had followed a brother to Chicago and opened a shop double the size of the old one, and they were hardly settled when Lieschen sickened suddenly and after long illness died. For many weeks there was no earning. Even the angry Grossvater saw that it was impossible, and doled out reluctantly the money they had helped him to save. Lieschen had always fretted him. Lotte was the best gift she had ever made the Bauer name, and when the funeral was over, he went home, secretly relieved that the long watch was over; went home to find that the precious chest, hidden always under piles of bedding in the closet where he locked his own possessions, had disappeared. There had been a moving from the story above. Men had gone up and down for an hour, and no one had noticed specially what was carried. There was no clew, even after days of searching; and Grossvater Bauer, who had rushed madly to the police station, haunted it now, with imploring questions, till told they could do nothing and that he must keep away. He sank then into the sort of apathy that had held him when the news came from Sedan. He went to his work, but there was no heart in it, and sat by the fire when night came, with only an impatient shake of the head when Lotte tried to comfort him. Till then no one had realized his age, but now his hair whitened and his broad shoulders bowed. He was an old man; and Lotte said to herself that his earning days were nearly over, and worked an hour or two later that the week’s gain might be a little larger and so comfort him.

She came home one afternoon with her bundle of work. Gretchen, who was nearly thirteen, had helped her carry it, and had shrunk back frightened as the foreman put a finger under her chin, and nodded smilingly at the peach-like face and the great blue eyes. Lotte struck down his hand passionately. She knew better than Gretchen what the smile meant. The child should never know if she could help it, and she did not mind the evil glance that followed her toward the door. There were people standing at their doors as she went slowly up the stairs, her breath coming quickly, as now it always did when she climbed them.

“Poor soul!” one of them said. “She little knows what she’s coming to.”

“Was ist los?” Lotte cried as the door opened, and then shrieked aloud, for the Grossvater lay there on the bed, crushed and disfigured and almost speechless, but lifting one hand feebly as she flew toward him.

“A sugar hogshead,” somebody said. “It rolled over him when he thought it was firm, and brought down some barrels with it. He’s past helping. May the saints have a heart for the poor children! He would be brought here, but what will you do with him?”

“There’ll be naught to do by morning,” said another. “Can’t you see he’s going?” But by morning no change had come, nor for many mornings. The wounds and bruises slowly healed, but save for the one hand that moved toward her, there were no signs of life. The strong body held by paralysis might linger for years, and Lotte must earn for him and for all. Even then a living might have been possible, for Gretchen had a place as cash-girl and earned two dollars a week, and Lisa was promised one after New Year’s. But it was a hard winter. They ate only what they must, and Lotte’s blue eyes looked out from hollow sockets, and she shivered with cold. Wages had fallen, and they fell faster and faster till by January her ten and twelve hours’ work brought her but six dollars instead of the eight or nine she had always earned. The foreman she hated made everything as difficult as possible. Though the bundle came ready from the cutting room, he had managed more than once to slip out some essential piece, and thus lessened her week’s wages, no price being paid where a garment was returned unfinished. He had often done this where girls had refused his advances, yet it was impossible to make complaint. The great house on Canal Street left these matters entirely with him, and regarded complaint as mere blackmailing. Lotte tried others, but wages were even less. She was sure of work here, and pay was prompt. With the spring things must be better. But long before the spring Lisa had sickened and died, and Lotte buried her in the Potter’s Field, and hurried home to make up the lost time, and hush the crying little ones as she could. It did not occur to her that she could write to Annchen and ask for help, and Franz had quarrelled with her because she did not put the Grossvater in a hospital and send the children to some asylum.

“I will even marry you with the children,” he said, “but never with the Grossvater who hindered and spoiled everything.”

“He has cared for me always, even when he was hard,” said Lotte. “I shall care for him now;” and Franz rushed away and had come no more.

For a year Lotte’s struggle went on. She knew only the one form of work; and she dared not take time to learn another.

“If it were not for the Grossvater,” she said, “and the children, I should have a place and work in the country and grow strong, but I cannot. If I die before them what can they do?”

There was other trouble. Gretchen’s light little head could never guard her pretty face. She was fourteen now, and tall and fair, fretting against the narrow life and refusing to stay indoors when evening came. One day she did not come home; and when Lotte sought her she saw only the evil smile and triumphant eyes of the foreman who had followed her a year ago and who laughed in her face as he shut the door.

“You’d better come in yourself,” he called. “You’d fare better if you did.”

Lotte went home dumb, and sat down at her machine. There was no money in the house, nor would be till she had taken home this work; but as she bent over it the blood poured in a stream from her mouth. She tried to rise, but fell back; and when the screaming children had brought in neighbors, Lotte’s struggle was quite over. When they had buried her in the Potter’s Field by Lisa, they took the bundle of work stained with her life-blood and carried it back to its owners.

“She’ll need no more,” said the old neighbor from the floor above as she laid it on the counter. “You’ve cut her down and cut her down, till there wasn’t life left to stand it longer. There’s not one of you to blame, you say, but I that know, know you’ve fastened her coffin-lid with nails o’ your own makin’, an’ that sooner or later you’ll come face to face, an’ find that red-hot is cowld to the hate that’s makin’ ready for you. An’ as for him that stands there smilin’, if it weren’t for the laws that spare the guilty and send the innocent to their deaths, God knows it would be the best thing these hands ever did to tear him to bits. But there’s no one to blame. Ye’re sure o’ that. Wait a while. The day’s comin’ when you’ll maybe think different; an’ may God speed it!”

CHAPTER NINTH.

THE EVOLUTION OF A JACKET.

“If underwear, whether for men or women, has proven itself a most excellent medium for starvation; if suits and dresses in general rank but a grade above; if shirts, whether of cotton or woollen, are a despair; and in each and all competition has cheapened material and manufacture and brought labor to the ‘life limit’ and below, at least it cannot be so bad with cloaks and jackets. Here are single garments, often of the most expensive material and put together in the most finished and perfect manner. Skilled labor is demanded, careful handling, spotless neatness. Here is one industry which must give not only a living wage, but a surplus. These women must be on the way to at least semi-prosperity.”

This was the thought in the days in which one phase after another of the underwear problem presented itself, each one more bewildering, more heart-sickening, than the last. Here and there had been the encounter with one who had always been sure of work and who had never failed to receive a fair return. But the summary had been inevitably as it stands recorded,—overwork, under-pay; a fruitless struggle against overwhelming odds.

With this thought the quest began anew. The manufacturers of cloaks and jackets reported “piece-work” as the rule. The great dry-goods establishments had the same word. Here and there was one where work was done on the premises, and where skilled hands held the same places year after year, the wages ranging from six to ten dollars, hardly varying. But for most of them the same causes stated in the third chapter, “The Methods of a Prosperous Firm,” have operated, and it has been found expedient to settle upon “piece-work” and let rent be paid and space be furnished by the workers themselves.

“They like it better,” said the business manager of the great firm against whom there have never been charges of dishonesty or unkindness in their treatment of employees. “It would be impossible to do all our work on the premises. We should want the entire block if we even half did it. But we know some of the women, and we pay as high as anybody; perhaps higher. It saves them car fares and going out in all weathers, and a great many other inconveniences, when they work at home, and I don’t see why there should be any objections made. The amount of it is, there are too many women. The best thing to be done is to ship them West. They say they’re wanted there, and there is certainly not room enough for them here. Machinery will soon take their place, anyway. I have one in mind now that ought to do the work of ten women perfectly, and require simply a tender and finisher. We shall get the thing down to a fine point very soon. Hard on the women? Why, no. We always hold on to first-class workers, and there’s nothing much to be done with second and third class except to use them through the busy season, and let them go in the dull.”

“Go where?”

The manager paused and looked reflectively at his well-kept finger-nails.

“My dear madam, that’s a question I have no time to consider. I dare say they earn a living somehow. Indeed, I’m told they go into cigar factories. There’s always plenty of work.”

“Plenty of work,”—a form of words so familiar that I looked for it now from both employer and employed. But for the last was an addition finding no place on the lips of the first: “Plenty of work? Oh, yes! I can always get plenty of work. The trouble is to get the wages for it.”

A block or so below, and further west, one great window of a cheaper establishment held jackets and wraps large and small, marked down for the holidays, their advertisement in a morning paper having read, “Jackets from $4 up.” Still further over, another window displayed numbers as great, and a placard at one side announced: “These elegant jackets from $2.87 up.” The cloth might be shoddy, but here was a garment, fashionably cut, well finished to all appearance, and unexceptionable in pattern and color. All along the crowded avenue the story was the same, and as east took the place of west, and Grand Street and the Bowery and Third Avenue gave in their returns, “These elegant jackets from $2.35 up” gave the final depth to which cheapness could descend.

If this was retail, what could be the wholesale price, and what was likely to be the story of the worker from whose hands they had come? It is worth while to follow these jackets as they emerge from the cutting-room, and in packages holding such number of dozens as has been agreed upon, pass to the express wagon which distributes them among the workers, the firm in mind at present, like many others, preferring this arrangement to any which involves dealing directly with the women.

First on the list stands the name of a woman a little over fifty years old, whose husband is a painter and who left Germany eight years ago, urged to come over by a daughter more adventurous than the rest, who had married and emigrated at once. Work was plentiful when they arrived, and the husband found immediate employment at his trade, with wages so high that the wife had no occasion for any employment outside her own rooms. The youngest child, a girl of nine, went to school. They lived in comfortable rooms on a decent street, put money in a savings bank, and felt that America held more good even than the name had always seemed to promise. Then came the financial troubles of 1879 and 1881, the gradual fall of wages, the long seasons when there was no work, and last, the fate that overtakes the worker in lead, whether painter or in any other branch,—first painter’s colic, and the long train of symptoms preceding the paralysis which came at last, the stroke a light one, but leaving the patient with the “drop hand” and all the other complications, testifying that the working days were over. Strength enough returned for an odd job now and then, and the little man accepted his fate cheerily, and congratulated himself that the bank held a little fund and that thus the lowering wages could be pieced out. The bank settled this question by almost immediate failure; a long and expensive illness for the wife followed; and when it ended furniture and small valuables of every sort had been pawned, and they left the empty rooms for narrower quarters and sought for work in which all could share. To add to the complication, the daughter, who had had good sense enough to take a place as child’s nurse, broke her leg, and became, even when able to walk again, too disabled to return to this work. She could run the machine, and her mother was an expert buttonhole-maker and had already learned various forms of work on cloth, both in cheap coats and pantaloons, and in jackets and cloaks. The jackets seemed to promise most, for in 1884 each one brought to the maker sixty cents, buttonholes being $1.50 per hundred, the presser receiving ten cents each and the finisher six cents, these amounts being deducted from the price paid on each. To save this amount the husband learned how to press, and though his crippled hands can barely grasp the iron, and often his wife must help him place the cramped fingers in position, he stands there smiling and well content to add this mite to the fund. For a year their home has been in a deep basement, where, save at noonday, it is impossible to run the machines without artificial light. A dark room opens from the one in which they work, itself dark, unventilated save from the hall, and chosen as abiding place because it represents but four dollars a month in rent. Two machines run by mother and daughter stand as near the window as possible, and close by is the press-board and the pale but optimistic little man, who looks proudly at each seam as he lays it open. Jackets are everywhere,—piled on chairs and scattered over the floor,—waiting the various operations necessary before they can at last be bundled on the ex-painter’s back, who smiles to himself as he toils down to the firm’s headquarters, reflecting that he has saved the expressage another week. What are the returns? Lisa will give them,—the wife whose English is still uncertain, and whose gentle, anxious eyes grow eager and bright as she talks, the husband nodding confirmation, or shaking his head as he sees the tears come suddenly, with a “Not so, not so, Lisa.”

“I know not if we shall live at all,” she says. “For see. We two, my Gretchen and I, we make but ten for a day. Tree dollar? Yes, but you must take from it de buttonhole an’ finish and much else, and it is so short—so short that we can work on them. The season, that is it—six weeks—two months, maybe, and then pantaloon till spring jacket come. See. It is early that we begin,—seven, maybe,—and all day we shall sew and sew. We eat no warm essen. On table dere is bread and beer in pitcher and cheese to-day. We sit not down, for time goes away so. No, we stand and eat as we must, and sew more and more. Ten jackets to one day—so Gretchen and me can make ten jackets to one day, but we sit always—we go not out. It is fourteen hours efery day—yes, many time sixteen—we work and work. Then we fall on bed and sleep, and when we wake again it is work always. And I must stop a leetle; not much, but a leetle, for my back have such pain that I fall on the bed to say, ‘Ach Gott! is it living to work so in this rich, free America?’ But he is sick always, my man, even if he will laugh. He say he must laugh alway for two because I cannot. For when this work is past it is only pantaloons, and sew so hard as we may it is five, six pair maybe, for Gretchen and me all day, and that not always. Many day we do nothing because they say work is dull, and then goes away all we save before. But we need not to ask help. So much is good that we work and earn, but I think I die soon of my pain, and who then helps his fingers so stiff to press or thinks how he will ache even when he will laugh? It is because America is best that we come, but how is it best to die because it is always work and no joy, no hope, never one so small stop?”

“Never one so small stop.” The attic had the same story, and the white-faced, hollow-eyed woman who tried to smile as she spoke turned also from the waiting pile of jackets and drew one or two back to the sheet spread for them on the floor to which they had slipped. A table and two chairs, a small stove in which burned bare handful of coals, the two machines, at one of which a girl of twenty still sewed on, and in the corner a bed, on which lay another girl of the same age, but with the crimson spot on her cheeks and the shining eyes of advanced consumption. It had been one of the faces so often seen behind the counters of the great stores, delicate in features and coloring, with soft dark eyes and fair masses of hair loose on the pillow.

“I try to keep her tidy,” the mother said, “but she can’t bear her hair up a minute, it’s so heavy on her head, an’ I’ve no time to ’tend to it but the minute I take in the morning. It’s jackets now that I’m on. I thought maybe there’d be less risk in them than cloaks. Cloaks seem to give ’em so much chance to cheat. I wouldn’t work at all at home, I’d be out doing by the day, for I had a good run of work, but there’s Maggie, and I can’t leave her, though God knows she gets little good of me but the knowing I’m here. I’ll tell you what they did to me on cloaks. I work for S—— & Co., far down on Broadway, and they give out the most expensive kind of cloaks, and nine dollars a dozen for the making; other kinds, too, but I’d been on them a good while and knew just how. The pay was regular, but before I’d had work from them a month I saw they were bound to make complaints and dock pay whether there was any fault in the work or not. One and another took their turn, and no help for it; for if they complained the foreman just said: ‘You needn’t take any work unless you like. There are plenty waiting to fill your place.’ Poor souls! What could they do but go on?

“At last came my turn. He tossed them all over. ‘It’s poor work,’ he said. ‘They’re not finished properly. You can’t be paid for botching. There’s three dollars, and that’s too much.’ ‘The work is the same it’s always been. There’s no botching,’ I said; but he held out the three dollars. ‘No,’ I said, ‘If you won’t pay fair I’ll go to the Woman’s Protective Union and see what they’ll do.’ His face was black as thunder. ‘Take your money,’ he says, holding out the rest, ‘but you may sing for more work from this establishment,’ and he flung the money on the floor. That didn’t trouble me, because I knew I could get work just below, and I did that same day; twenty cloaks, ten to be made at sixty cents apiece, and ten at fifty-five cents. I had Angie here to help, and when they were done I carried them down. This man was a Jew, but there’s small difference. If the Jew knew best how to cheat in the beginning, the Christian caught up with him long ago. ‘The buttons are all on wrong,’ he said. ‘I told you to set them an inch further back. We’ll have to alter them every one and charge you for the time.’ ‘I can take oath they are on as I was told to put them on,’ I said, ‘but if they must be changed I’ll change them myself and save the money.’

“It took long talking to make him agree, but at last he said I could come next morning but one, and he’d let me alter them as a great favor. I did come down, but he said they couldn’t wait and had made the change, and he charged me six dollars for what he said was my mistake. It was no use to complain. He could swear I had done the job wrong, and so I went home with $5.50 instead of eleven dollars for nearly a fortnight’s work. I changed the place, and so far nobody has docked me; but doing my best, and Angie working as steady as I do, we can’t make more than twenty cents on a jacket, and it’s a short season. When it’s over I do coats, but it’s less pay than jackets, and there’s living and Maggie’s medicine and the doctor, though he won’t take anything. I’d feel better if he did, but he won’t. Angie used to be in a factory, but there’s the baby now, and she doesn’t know what way to turn but this. See, he’s here by Maggie.” The sick girl lifted a corner of the quilt, and something stirred,—a baby of seven or eight months whose great eyes looked out from a face weazened and sharpened, deep experience seeming graven in every line.

“He’s a wise one,” the sick girl said. “He’s found it’s no use to cry, and he likes to be by me because it’s warm. But he frightens me sometimes, for he just lies and looks at me as if he knew a million things and could tell them every one. He’s always hungry, and maybe that makes him wiser. I’m sure I could tell some things that people don’t know.”

The words came with gasps between. It was plain that what she had to tell must find speedy listener if it were to be heard at all, but for that day at least the story must wait. Here, as in other places, the cloakmaker was earning from sixty to seventy cents a day, but even this was comfort and profusion compared with the facts that waited in a Fourth Ward street, and in a rookery not yet reached by any sanitary laws the city may count as in operation. Here and there still remains one of the old wooden houses with dormer windows, a remnant of the city’s early days and given over to the lowest uses,—a saloon below and tenements above. In one of these, in a room ten feet square, low-ceiled, and lighted by but one window whose panes were crusted with the dirt of a generation, seven women sat at work. Three machines were the principal furniture. A small stove burned fiercely, the close smell of red-hot iron hardly dominating the fouler one of sinks and reeking sewer-gas. Piles of cloaks were on the floor, and the women, white and wan, with cavernous eyes and hands more akin to a skeleton’s than to flesh and blood, bent over the garments that would pass from this loathsome place saturated with the invisible filth furnished as air. They were handsome cloaks, lined with quilted silk or satin, trimmed with fur or sealskin, and retailing at prices from thirty to seventy-five dollars. A teapot stood at the back of the stove; some cups and a loaf of bread, with a lump of streaky butter, were on a small table absorbing their portion also of filth. An inner room, a mere closet, dark and even fouler than the outer one, held the bed; a mattress, black with age, lying on the floor. Here such as might be had was taken when the sixteen hours of work ended,—sixteen hours of toil unrelieved by one gleam of hope or cheer; the net result of this accumulated and ever-accumulating misery being $3.50 a week. Two women, using their utmost diligence, could finish one cloak per day, receiving from the “sweater,” through whose hands all must come, fifty cents each for a toil unequalled by any form of labor under the sun, unless it be that of the haggard wretches dressed in men’s clothes, but counted as female laborers, in Belgian mines. They cannot stop, they dare not stop, to think of other methods of earning. They have no clothing in which they could obtain even entrance to an intelligence office. They have no knowledge that could make them servants of even the meanest order. They are what is left of untrained, hopelessly ignorant lives, clinging to these lives with a tenacity hardly higher in intelligence than that of the limpet on the rock, but turning to one with lustreless eyes and blank faces, holding only the one question,—“Lord, how long?” They are one product of nineteenth-century civilization, and these seven are but types, hundreds of their kind confronting the searcher, who looks on aghast and who, as the list lengthens and case after case gives in its unutterably miserable details, turns away in a despair only matched by that of the worker. Yet they are here, this army of incompetents, marching through torture to their graves; and till we have found some method by which torture may lessen, these lives as they vanish pass on to the army of avengers, and will face us by and by when excuses fall away and Justice comes face to face with the weak souls that failed in the flesh to know its nature or its demand.

CHAPTER TENTH.

BETWEEN THE RIVERS.

“The nearer the river the nearer to hell.”

It was a strong word, and the big chest from which it issued held more of the same sort,—a tall worker, carpenter apparently, hurrying on with his box of tools and talking, as he went, with a companion half his size, but with quite his power of expression, interjecting strange German oaths as he listened to the story poured out to him. With that story we have at present nothing to do. But the first words lingered, and they linger still as the summary of such life as is lived by many workers on east and west sides alike.

Were the laws governing a volume of this nature rigidly observed, the present phase of this investigation could hardly be the point at which to stop for any detail of how these workers live from day to day. But as the search has gone on through these hours when Christmas joy is in the air, when the smallest shop hangs out its Christmas token, and the great stores are thronged with buyers far into the evening, I think of the lives in which Christmas has no place, of the women for whom all days are alike, each one the synonyme of relentless, unending toil; of the children who have never known a childhood and for whom Christmas is but a name. For even when mission and refuge have done their utmost, there is still the army unreached by any effort and in great part unreachable, no method recorded in any system of the day having power to drag them to the light and thus make known to us what manner of creature it is that cowers in shadowy places and has no foothold in the path we call progress. That their own ignorance holds them in these shadows, bound as with chains; that even a little more knowledge would break the bonds, in part at least, has no present bearing on the fact that thousands are alive among us to whom existence has brought only pain, and that fresh thousands join this dumb throng of martyrs with every added year. If they had learned in any degree how to use to the best advantage the pittance earned, there would be less need of these chapters; yet as I read the assurances of our political economists, that a wage of four dollars per week is sufficient, if intelligently used, to supply all the actual necessities of the worker, the question pushes itself between the lines: “Why should they be forced to know only necessities; and is this statement made of any save those too ignorant to define their wants and needs, too helpless to dare any protestation, even if more knowledge had come?”

The professional political economist of the old school, the school to which all but a handful belong, takes refuge in the census returns as the one reply to any arraignment of the present. Blind as a bat to any figures save his own, he answers all complaint with the formula: “In 1860 the property of this country, equally divided, would have given every man, woman, and child $514 each. In 1870 the share would have been $624; in 1880, $814. In 1886 returns are not in, but $900 and more would be the division per capita. What madness to talk of suffering when this flood of wealth pours through the land. Admitting that the lowest class suffer, it is chiefly crime, drunkenness, etc., that bring suffering. The majority are perfectly comfortable.”

Having read this statement in many letters and heard it in interviews as well, it seems plain that the conviction embodied in both has fastened itself upon that portion of the public whose thinking is done for them, and who range themselves by choice with that order who would not be convinced “even though one rose from the dead.” “The majority are perfectly comfortable.” Let us see how comfortable.

I turn first to the pair, a mother and daughter, a portion of whose experience found place in the chapter on “More Methods of Prosperous Firms.” Here, as in so many cases, there had been better days, and when these suddenly ended a period of bewildered helplessness, in which the widow felt that respectability like hers must know no compromise, and that any step that would involve her “being talked about” was a step toward destruction. She must live on a decent street, in a house where she need not be ashamed to have the relations come, and she did till brought face to face with the fact that there were no more dollars to spend upon respectability, and that her quarters must hereafter conform to her earnings. She had been a dweller in that curious triangle, the remnant of “Greenwich village,” the stronghold still of old New York, and she went at once to a region as unfamiliar to her conservative feet as Baxter or Hester, or any other street given over to evil. Far over toward the North River, in the first floor of a great tenement-house inhabited by the better class of Irish chiefly, she took two rooms, one a mere closet where the bed could stand; bestowed in them such furniture as remained, and at fifty, with no clew left that any friend could trace, began the fight for bread.

“It might have been better to go to the country,” she said. “But you see I wasn’t used to the country, and then any work I could get to do was right here. I’d always liked to sew, and so had Emeline, and we found we could get regular work on children’s suits, with skirts and such things in the dull seasons. It was good pay, and we were comfortable till prices began to fall. We made fifteen dollars a week sometimes, and could have got ahead if it hadn’t been for a little debt of my husband’s that I wanted to pay, for we’d never owed anybody a penny and I couldn’t let even that debt stand against his name. But when it was paid, somehow I came down with rheumatic fever, and I’ve never got back my full strength yet. And the prices kept going down. Emmy is an expert. I never knew her make a mistake, but working twelve and fourteen hours a day,—and it’s ’most often fourteen,—the most she has made for more than a year and a half is eighty-five cents a day, and on that we’ve managed. I suppose we couldn’t if I ever went out, but I’ve had no shoes in two years. I patch the ones I got then with one of my husband’s old coats, and keep along, but we never get ahead enough for me to have shoes, and Emmy too, and she’s the one that has to go out. How we live? It’s all in this little book. It’s foolish to put it down, and yet I always somehow liked to see how the money went, even when I had plenty, and it’s second nature to put down every cent. Take last month. It had twenty-seven working days: $22.95. Out of that we took first the ten dollars for rent. I’ve been here eleven years, and they’ve raised a dollar on me twice. That leaves $12.95 for provisions and coal and light and clothes. ’Tisn’t much for two people, is it? You wouldn’t think it could be done, would you? Well, it is, and here’s the expense for one week for what we eat:—

“This week was an expensive one, for I got a pound of butter at once, but it will last into next week. And we had to have the scissors sharpened; that was five cents. There would have been five cents for wood, but you see they’re building down the street, and one of the boys upstairs brought me a basketful of bits. You see there’s no meat. We like it, but we only get a bit for Sundays sometimes. Emmy never wants much. Running a machine all day seems to take your appetite. But she likes clams; you see we had them twice, and I happened to read in the paper a good while ago that you could make soup of the water the cabbage was boiled in; a quart of the water and a cup of milk and a bit of butter and some flour to thicken. You wouldn’t think it could be good, but it is, and it goes a good way. The coal ought not to be in with the food, ought it, unless it stays because I have to use it cooking? We oughtn’t to spend so much on food, but I can’t seem to make it less. Really, when you take out the coal and oil and the paper,—and we do want to see a paper sometimes,—it’s only 1.62 for us both; eighty-one cents apiece; almost twelve cents a day, but I can’t well seem to make it less. I call it twelve cents a day apiece. For the month that makes $7.44, and so you see there’s $5.51 left. Then there are Emmy’s car-fares when she goes out, for sometimes she works down-town and only evenings at home. Last month it was sixty cents a week, $2.70 for the month, and so there was just $2.81 left, and $1.50 of that went for shoes for Emmy. The month before, my hands weren’t so stiff and I helped her a good deal, so we earned $26.70, and she got two remnants for $1.80 at Ehrich’s and I made her a dress that looks very well. But she’s nothing but patchwork underneath, and I’m the same, only worse. The coal is the trouble. By the scuttle it costs so much, and I try to get ahead and have a quarter of a ton at once, for there are places here to keep coal, but I never can. If it weren’t for Emmy’s missing me, it would be better for me to die, for I’m no use, you see, and times get no better, but worse. But I can’t, and we must get along somehow. Lord help us all!”

“How could twelve cents’ worth of coal do a week’s cooking?”

“It couldn’t. It didn’t. I’ve a little oil stove that just boils the kettle, and tea and bread and butter what we have mostly. A gallon of oil goes a long way, and I can cook small things over it, too. The washing takes coal, and you see I must have soap and all that. I don’t see how we could spend less. I’ve learned to manage even with what we get now, but there’s a woman next door that I know better than anybody in this house,—for here it always seemed to me best to keep quite to myself for many reasons, but the chief that I’m always hoping for a change and a chance for Emmy. But this woman is a nice German woman that fell on the ice and sprained her ankle last winter, and we saw to her well as we could till she got better. She won’t mind telling how she manages, but she’s in the top of the house. She’s a widow, and everybody dead belonging to her.”

This house was a grade below the last in cleanliness, and children swarmed on stairs and in hall. Up to the fourth floor back; a ten-feet-square room, with one window, where, in spite of a defective sink in the hall, the odor from which seemed to penetrate and saturate everything, spotless cleanliness was the expression of every inch of space.

“Vy not?” the old woman said, when she understood my desire. “I tells you mine an’ more, too, for down de stairs I buy every day for the girl that is sick and goes out no more. If I quick were as girl I could save much, but I have sixty-five year. How shall I be quick? I earn forty-five, fifty cents sometime, but forty-five for day’s work when I go as I can. An’ so for week dat is $2.70; I can ten dollars a month, sometimes twelve dollars, and I pays three dollars for this room. To eat I will buy tea and our bread,—rye, for dat is stronger as your fine wheat. Tea is American, but I will not beer any more, since I see how women drinks it and de kinder, and it not like our beer but more tipsy. So I makes tea, and de cheese and de wurst is all not so much. It is de coal that is most. Vat I vill eat, he cost not so more as fifty cent; sometimes sixty, but I eat not ever all I could, for I must be warm a little, and dere is light, and to wash, and some shoe. It is bad to be big as I, for shoe not last. But a loaf of bread, five cents, do all day and some in next; and cheese a pound is ten, if I have him; and wurst is fifteen, for sometime he is best, and a pound stay a week if I not greedy. Tea will be thirty cents, but he is good a month, and sugar a pound, two pound sometime, but butter no, and milk a cent for Sunday. So I live, and I beg not. Can I more? I thank the good God only that there is no more Hans or Lisa or any to be hungry with me. It is good they go.”

“And you buy for some one else?”

“Oh ja, but she will die soon and care not. It is de kinder that care. Two, and one six and one eight and cannot earn. She sew all day on machine. It is babies’ cloaks, so vite and nice. In two days she will make dree, for see, dere is two linings and cape and cuff is all scallop, and she must stitch first and then bind and hem. All is hem, all over inside, so nice, and she make dem so nice. But eight dollars a dozen is all, and it is a week for nine, and so she get not more as five dollars because she is sick and must stop. And there is the grandvater that is old, and de kinder and she and all must live. Rent is $5.50, dat I know, and I pay for her dis week $1.60 for bread and tea and potatoes and some milk, and molasses for de kinder on bread, and butter a little, and milk, but not meat. It is de grandvater eat too much, but how shall one help it? De rest is clothes for all, but dere is no shoe for de kinder, and I see not if dere will be shoe. How shall it be?”

One after another the cases on the west side gave in their testimony. Save in the first one there were no formal accounts. But a little thinking brought out the items,—for many baker’s bread, tea, sugar, a little milk, and butter and a bit of meat once or twice a week, the average cost of food per head for the majority of cases being ninety cents per week. All coal was bought by the scuttle, a scuttle of medium size counting as twelve cents’ worth, thus much more than doubling the cost per ton. In the same way, wood by the bundle and oil by the quart gave the utmost margin of profit to the seller, and the same fact applied to all provisions sold. In no case save the one first mentioned, where the mother had learned that cabbage-water can form the basis for a nourishing and very palatable soup, was there the faintest gleam of understanding that the same amount of money could furnish a more varied, more savory, and more nourishing regimen.

“Beans!” said one indignant soul. “What time have I to think of beans, or what money to buy coal to cook ’em? What you’d want if you sat over a machine fourteen hours a day would be tea like lye to put a back-bone in you. That’s why we have tea always in the pot, and it don’t make much odds what’s with it. A slice of bread is about all. Once in a while you get ragin’, tearin’ hungry. Seems as if you’d swallow teapot or anything handy to fill up like, but that ain’t often—lucky for us!”

“If you all clubbed together, couldn’t one cook for you,—make good soup and oatmeal and things that are nourishing? You would be stronger then.”

“Stronger for what? More hours at the machine? More grinding your own flesh and bones into flour for them that’s over us? Ma’am, it’s easy to see you mean well, an’ I won’t say but what you know more than some that comes around what you’re talkin’ about. Club we might. I’m not denying it could be done, if there was time; but who of us has the time even if she’d the will? I was never much hand for cookin’. We’d our tea an’ bread an’ a good bit of fried beef or pork, maybe, when my husband was alive an’ at work. He cared naught for fancy things like beans an’ such. It’s the tea that keeps you up, an’ as long as I can get that I’ll not bother about beans.”

In the same house an old Swiss woman, who had fallen from her first estate as lady’s maid through one grade and another of service, was ending her days on a wage of two dollars per week, earned in a suspender factory, where she sewed on buckles. In her case marriage with a drinking husband had eaten up both her savings and her earnings, and age now prevented her taking up household service, which she ranked as most comfortable and most profitable. But she had been taught while almost a child to cook, and though her expenditure for food was a little below a dollar per week, the savory smell from a saucepan on her tiny stove showed that she had something more nearly like nourishment than her neighbors.

“I try sometimes to teach,” she said. “I give some of my soup, and they eat it and say it is good, but they not stop to do so much dat is fuss. All this in the saucepan is seven cents,—three cents for bones and some bits the kind butcher trow in, and the rest vegetable and barley. But it makes me two days. I have lentils, too, yes, and beans, and plenty things to flavor, and I buy rye bread and coffee to Sunday. Never tea, oh, no! Tea is so vicket. It make hand shake and head fly all round. Good soup is best, and more when one can. Vegetable is many and salad, and when I make more dollar I buy some egg. But not tea; not big loaf of white bread dot swell and swell inside and ven it is gone leave one all so empty. I would teach many but they like it not. They want only de tea; always de tea.”

“De tea” and the sewing-machine are naturally inseparable allies, and so long as the sewing-women must work fourteen hours daily they will remain so; the rank fluid retarding digestion and thus proving as friendly an aid as the “bone” which the half-fed Irish peasant demands in his potato. For the west side the story was quite plain, but for such returns as the east side has to offer there is still room for further detail.

CHAPTER ELEVENTH.

UNDER THE BRIDGE AND BEYOND.

Between east and west side poverty and its surroundings exists always this difference, that the west is newer and thus escapes the inherited miseries that hedge about life in such regions as the Fourth Ward. There, where old New York once centred, and where Dutch gables and dormer windows may still be seen, is not only the foulness of the present, each nationality in the swarming tenements representing a distinct type of dirt and a distinct method of dealing with it and in it, but the foulness also of the past, in decay and mould and crumbling wall and all silent forces of destruction at work here for a generation and more. Those of us who have watched the evolution of the Fourth Ward into some show of decency recognize many causes as having worked toward the same end; yet even when one notes to-day the changes wrought, first by business, the march of which has wiped out many former landmarks, setting in their place great warehouses and factories, and then of philanthropy, which, as in the case of Miss Collins’s tenements, has transformed dens into some semblance of homes, there remains the conviction that dens are uppermost still. The business man hurrying down Fulton or Beekman Street, the myriads who pass up and down in the various east-side car lines, with those other myriads who cross the great Bridge, have small conception what thousands are packed away in the great tenements, and the rookeries even more crowded, or what depth of vileness flaunts itself openly when day is done and the creatures of shadow come out to the light that for many quarters is the only sunshine. This ward has had minute and faithful description from one of the most energetic of workers for better sanitary conditions among the poor,—Mr. Charles Wingate, whose admirable papers on “Tenement House Life,” published by the “Tribune” in 1884-1885, must be regarded as authority for the sanitary phases of the question. Little by little these have bettered, till the death rate has come within normal limits and the percentage of crime ceased to represent the largest portion of the inhabitants. Yet here, on this familiar battle-ground, civilization and something worse than mere barbarism still struggle. For which is the victory?

Under the great Bridge, whose piers have taken the place of much that was foulest in the Fourth Ward, stands a tenement-house so shadowed by the structure that, save at midday, natural light barely penetrates it. The inhabitants are of all grades and all nationalities. The men are chiefly ’longshoremen, working intermittently on the wharves, varying this occupation by long seasons of drinking, during which every pawnable article vanishes, to be gradually redeemed or altogether lost, according to the energy with which work is resumed. The women scrub offices, peddle fruit or small office necessities, take in washing, share, many of them, in the drinking bouts, and are, as a whole, content with brutishness, only vaguely conscious of a wretchedness that, so long as it is intermittent, is no spur to reform of methods. The same roof covers many who yield to none of these temptations, but are working patiently; some of them widows with children that must be fed; a few solitary, but banding with neighbors in cloak or pantaloon making, or the many forms of slop-work in the hands of sweaters. Sunshine has no place in these rooms which no enforced laws have made decent, and where occasional individual effort has power against the unspeakable filth ruling in tangible and intangible forms, sink and sewer and closet uniting in a common and all-pervading stench. The chance visitor has sometimes to rush to the outer air, deadly sick and faint at even a breath of this noisomeness. The most determined one feels inclined to burn every garment worn during such quest, and wonders if Abana or Pharpar or even Jordan itself could carry healing and cleansing in their floods.

The dark halls have other uses than as receptacles for refuse or filth. Hiding behind doors or in corners, or, grown bolder, seeking no concealment, children hardly more than babies teach one another such new facts of foulness as may so far have chanced to escape them,—baby voices reciting a ritual of oaths and obscenity learned in this Inferno, which, could it have place by Dante’s, might be better known to a cultured generation. Only a Zola could describe deliberately what any eye may see, but any minute detail of which would excite an outburst of popular indignation. Yet I am by no means certain that such detail has not far more right to space than much that fills our morning papers, and that the plain bald statement of facts, shorn of all flights of fancy or play of facetiousness, might not rouse the public to some sense of what lies below the surface of this fair-seeming civilization of to-day. Not alone in the shadow of the great pier, but wherever men and women must herd like brutes, these things exist and shape the little lives that missions do not, and as yet cannot, reach, and that we prefer to deal with later, when actual violation of laws has placed them in the hands of the State. Work as she may, the woman who must find home for herself and children in such surroundings is powerless to protect them from the all-pervading foulness. They may escape a portion of the actual degradation. They can never escape a knowledge the possibility of which is unknown to what we call barbarism, but part and parcel of the daily life of civilization.

Granted instantly that only the lowest order of worker must submit to such conditions, yet we have seen that this lowest order is legion; that its numbers increase with every day; and that no Board of Health or of Sanitary Inspectors has yet been able to alter, save here and there, the facts that are a portion of the tenement-house system.

It is chiefly with the house under the Bridge that we deal at present. Its upper rooms hold many workers whose testimony has helped to make plain how the east side lives. Little by little, as the blocks of granite swung into place and the pier grew, the sunshine vanished, its warmth and light replaced by the electric glow, cold and hard and blinding. The day’s work has ceased to be the day’s work, and the women who cannot afford the gas or oil that must burn if they work in the daytime, sleep while day lasts, and when night comes and the electric light penetrates every corner of the shadowy rooms, turn to the toil by which their bread is won. Never was deeper satire upon the civilization of which we boast. Natural law, natural living, abolished once for all, and this light that blinds but holds no cheer shining upon the mass of weary humanity who have forgotten what sunshine may mean and who know no joy that life was meant to hold!

In one of these rooms, clean, if cleanliness were possible where walls and ceiling and every plank and beam reek with the foulness from sewer and closet, three women were at work on overalls. Two machines were placed directly under the windows to obtain every ray of light. The room, ten by twelve feet, with a small one half the size opening from it, held a small stove, the inevitable teapot steaming at the back; a table with cups and saucers and a loaf of bread still uncut; and a small dresser in one corner, in which a few dishes were ranged. A sickly geranium grew in an old tomato-can, but save for this the room held no faintest attempt at adornment of any sort. In many of them the cheapest colored prints are pinned up, and in one, one side had been decorated with all the trademarks peeled from the goods on which the family worked. Here there was no time for even such attempts at betterment. The machines rushed on as we talked, with only a momentary pause as interest deepened, and one woman nodded confirmation to the statement of another.

“We’ve clubbed, so’s to get ahead a little,” said the finisher, whose fingers flew as she made buttonholes in the waistband and flap of the overalls. “We were each in a room by ourselves, but after the fever, when the children died and I hadn’t but two left, it seemed as if we’d be more sensible to all go in together and see if we couldn’t be more comfortable. We’d have left anyway, and tried for a better place, but for one thing,—we hadn’t time to move; and for another, queer as it seems, you get used to even the worst places and feel as if you couldn’t change. We’ll have to, if the landlord doesn’t do something about the closets. It’s no good telling the agent, and I don’t know as anybody in the house knows just who the landlord is. Anyway, the smell’s enough to kill you sometimes, and it’s a burning disgrace that human beings have to live in such a pig-pen. It’s cheap rent. We pay five dollars a month for this place. When I came here it was from a neck-tie place over on Allen Street, that’s moved now, and my husband was mate on a tug and earned well. But he took to drink and sold off everything I’d brought with me, and at last he was hurt in a fight round the corner, and died in hospital of gangrene. Mary’s husband there was a bricklayer and had big wages, but he drank them fast as he made them, and he was ugly when the drink was in, which mine wasn’t. But there’s hardly one in this house, man or woman, that don’t take a drop to keep off the fever; and even I, that hate the sight or smell of it, I wake up in the morning with an awful kind o’ goneness that seems as if a taste might help it. The tea stops that, though. Tea’s the best friend we’ve got. We’d never stand it if it wasn’t for tea.”

“Are overalls steady pay through the year?”

“There’s nothing that’s steady, so far as I can find out, but want and misery. Just now overalls are up; the Lord only knows why, for you never can tell what’ll be up and what down. They’re up, and we’re making a dollar a dozen on these. I have done a dozen a day, but it’s generally ten. There’s the long seams, and the two pockets, and the buckle strap and the waistband and three buttonholes, and the stays and the finishing. They’re heavy machines too, and take the backbone right out of you before night comes. But you sleep like the dead, that’s one comfort. It would be more if you didn’t have to wake more than they do. When the overall rush is over, it’ll be back to pants again. That’s my trade. I learned it regular after I was married, when I saw Tim wasn’t going to be any dependence. There were the children then, and I thought I’d send ’em to school and keep things decent maybe. I know all about pants, the best and the worst, but it’s mostly worse these days. First the German women piled in ready to do your work for half your rates, and when they’d got well started, in comes the Italians and cuts under, till it’s a wonder anybody keeps soul and body together.”

“We don’t,” one of the women said, turning suddenly. “I got rid o’ my soul long ago, such as ’twas. Who’s got time to think about souls, grinding away here fourteen hours a day to turn out contract goods? ’Tain’t souls that count. It’s bodies that can be driven, an’ half starved an’ driven still, till they drop in their tracks. I’m driving now to pay a doctor’s bill for my three that went with the fever. Before that I was driving to put food into their mouths. I never owed a cent to no man. I’ve been honest and paid as I went and done a good turn when I could. If I’d chosen the other thing while I’d a pretty face of my own I’d a had ease and comfort and a quick death. Such life as this isn’t living.”

The machine whirled on as she ended, to make up the time lost in her outburst. The finisher shook her head as she looked at her, then poured a cup of tea and put it silently on the edge of the table where it could be reached.

“She’s right enough,” she said, “but there’s no use thinking about it. I try to sometimes, just to see if there’s any way out, but there isn’t. I’ve even said I’d take a place; but I don’t know anything about housework, and who’d take one looking as I do, and not a rag that’s fit to be put on? I cover up in an old waterproof when I go for work. They wouldn’t give it to me if they saw my dress in rags below, and me with no time to mend it. But we’re doing better than some. We’ve had meat twice this week, and we’ve kept warm. It’s the coal that eats up your money,—twelve cents a scuttle, and no place to keep more if ever we got ahead enough to get more at a time. It’s lucky that tea’s so staying. Give me plenty of tea, and the most I want generally besides is bread and a scrape of butter. It’s all figured out. It’s long since I’ve spent more than seventy-five cents a week for what I must eat. I’ve no time to cook even if I had anything, so it’s lucky I haven’t. I suppose there’d be plenty to eat if you once made up your mind to take a place.”

It was the second machine that stopped now, and the haggard woman running it faced about suddenly. “Do you know what come to my girl,” she said,—“my girl that I brought up decent and that was a good girl? I said to myself a trade was no good, for it was more an’ more starvation wages, and I’d put her with folks that would be good to her, even if the other girls did look down on her for going into service. She was fifteen, and a still little thing with soft eyes and a pretty, soft way, if she did come of a drinking father. I put her with a lady that wanted a waitress and said she’d train her well. She’d three boarders in the house, and all gentlemen to look at, and one that’s in a bank to-day he did his best to turn her head on the sly, and when he found he couldn’t, one Sunday when she was alone in the house and none to hear or help, he had his will. The mistress turned her off the hour she heard it, for Nettie went to her when she come home. ‘Such things don’t happen unless the girl is to blame,’ she said. ‘Never show your shameless face here again.’ Nettie came home to me kind of dazed, and she stayed dazed till she went to a hospital and a baby was born dead, and she dead herself a week after. An’ it isn’t one time alone or my girl alone. It’s over an’ over an’ over that that thing happens. There’s plenty that go to the bad of their own free will, but I know plenty more with the same chance that doesn’t, an’ there’s many a mother that’s been in service herself that says, ‘Whatever the mistress may know about it she can’t tell, but the devil’s let loose when the master or a son maybe is around, an’ they’ll not have their girls standing what they had to stand and then turned off without a character because they were found with the master talkin’ to ’em.’ It’s women that keeps women down an’ is hard on ’em. I’ll take my chances with any Jew you’ll bring along before I’ll put myself in the power of women that calls themselves ladies an’ hasn’t as much heart as a broomstick; an’ I’ll warn every girl to keep to herself an’ learn a trade, an’ not run the risk she’ll run if she goes out to service, letting alone the way you’re looked down on.”

There was no time for discussion. The machines must go on; but, as usual, much more than the fact of which I was in search had come to me, and, strangely enough, in this house and in others of its kind inspected one after another, much the same story was told. In the “improved tenements” close at hand, where comparative comfort reigned, more than one woman gave willingly the detail of the weekly expenditure for food, and added, as if the underlying question had made itself felt, “It’s betther to be a little short even an’ your own misthress,” with other words that have their place elsewhere. On the upper floor of one of these houses a pantaloon-maker sat in a fireless room, finishing the last of a dozen which when taken back would give her money for coal and food. She had been ill for three days, and on the bed,—an old mattress on a dry-goods box in the corner. “Even that’s more than I had for a good while,” she said. “I’d pawned everything before my husband died, except the machine. I couldn’t make but twenty-two cents a pair on the pants, an’ as long as he could hold up he did the pressing. With him to help a little I made three a day. That seems little, but there was so many pieces to each pair,—side and watch and pistol pockets, buckle strap, waistband, and bottom facings and lap; six buttonholes and nine buttons. We lived—I don’t just know how we lived. He was going in consumption an’ very set about it. ‘I’ll have no medicine an’ no doctor to make me hang an’ drag along,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to go, an’ I know it, an’ I’ll do it as fast as I can.’ He was Scotch, an’ took his porridge to the last, but I came to loathe the sight of it. He could live on six cents a day. I couldn’t. ‘I’m the kind for your contractors,’ he’d say. ‘It’s a glorious country, and the rich’ll be richer yet when there’s more like me.’ He didn’t mind what he said, an’ when a Bible-reader put her head in one day, ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘My wife’s working for a Christian contractor at sixty-six cents a day, an’ I’m what’s left of another Christian’s dealings with me, keeping me as a packer in a damp basement and no fire. Come in and let’s see what more Christianity has to say about it.’ He scared her, his eyes was so shiny an’ he most gone then. But there’s many a one that doesn’t go over fifty cents a week for what she’ll eat. God help them that’s starving us all by bits, if there is a God, but I’m doubting it, else why don’t things get better, an’ not always worse an’ worse?”

For east and west, however conditions might differ, the final word was the same, and it stands as the summary of the life that is lived from day to day by these workers,—“never better, always worse and worse.”