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.