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:--
Sugar, 23; Tomatoes, 7; Potatoes, 5 $0.35
Tea, 15; Butter, 30; Bread, 12 0.57
Coal, 12; Milk, 15; Clams, 10 0.37
Oil, 15; Paper, 1; Clams, 10; Potatoes, 5 0.31
Cabbage, 5; Bread, 7; Flour, 15; Rolls, 3 0.30
----
Total $1.90
"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.