If I had not heard the bitter cry,
If I had not seen the bleeding feet—
I think I should echo the salving lie
That toil is jolly and chains are sweet.
If I had not walked the bedless night,
If I had not lived the mealless day—
I think I should censure the appetite
Of thieves that pilfer and fools that slay.
If I had not heard and seen and felt
And wept for lack of a pathway out—
Most like I should pat an expansive belt
And say nice things of the Russian knout.
* * * * *
A woman of philanthropic tendencies was paying a visit to a lower East
Side school. She was particularly interested in a group of poor pupils
and asked permission to question them.
“Children, which is the greatest of all virtues?”
No one answered.
“Now, think a little. What is it I am doing when I give up time and
pleasure to come and talk with you for your own good?”
A grimy hand went up in the rear of the room.
“Please, ma’am, youse are buttin’ in.”—_The Delineator._
* * * * *
The _Ladies Home Journal_ believes that, no less than factory and
commercial worker, the oldest of home workers—the “domestic”—should be
protected by standardization of wages, hours and living conditions. An
editorial in the March issue says:
There is today practically no standard of wages for domestic help. The
wages vary in different cities: in fact they vary in a city and a
neighboring suburb. One “employment agency” fixes one wage: another
settles on a different wage. There is no equitable fairness either to
mistress or servant. No one really knows what is fair. The same
haphazard system applies to hours of work. Neither employer nor
servant knows what constitutes a fair day’s work for a cook or a maid.
The whole question should be threshed out and adjusted to a standard
just as are other branches of labor. Whether the eight-hour idea can
be effectively worked out in the home is a question: more likely we
shall have to begin on a ten-hour-day basis and gradually adjust
ourselves to an eight-hour schedule with extra pay for extra hours.
Employer and helper should know exactly where each stands on both
questions of hours and wages. There is no further reason why,
gradually, the system of our servants living outside of our homes
should not be generally brought into vogue—the same as the working
women engaged in all business lines. It is now done in “flats” and
“apartments” where there is no room for servants’ quarters, and there
is really no reason why the system should not be followed in houses
where there is room. This would give a freedom of life to the servant
that she does not now have, and which lack of freedom, and hours of
her own and a life of her own, is the chief source of objection to
domestic service, while the employers’ gain would lie in the fact that
our homes could be smaller in proportion to the number of servants for
whom we must now have rooms. In other words there seems to be no
practical reason, except a blind adherence to custom, why the worker
in the home should not be placed on exactly the same basis as the
worker in the office, the store or the factory. That this idea is
destined to come in the future, and in the near future, admits of no
doubt. Of course it will take some time to consider all the phases of
the matter that make home service different from office or store
service. But we shall never solve the question of domestic service
until we first place it on a practical business basis.
* * * * *
In the library of Clark University the volumes of Charles Booth’s Life
and Labor of London are bound under the title A Survey of London.