longingly toward domestic service as something that might offer much
more individual possibility of comfort and contentment than the trades
afford. But save for one here and there who has chanced to find an
employer who knows the meaning of justice as well as of human sympathy,
the mass turn away hopeless of any change in methods. Yet reform
among intelligent employers could easily be brought about were the
question treated from the standpoint of justice, and the demand made
an equally imperative and binding one for each side. The mistresses
who command the best service are those who make rigorous demands, but
keep their own side of the bargain as rigorously. They are few, for
the American temperament is one of submission, varied by sudden bursts
of revolt, and despairing return to a worse state than the first. A
training-school for mistresses is as much an essential as one for the
servants. The conditions of modern life come more complicated with
every year; and as simplification becomes for the many less and less
possible, it is all the more vitally necessary to study the subject
from the new standpoint, settle once for all how and why we have
failed, and begin again on the new foundation.
Here then stands the arraignment of domestic service under its present
conditions, given point by point as it has formulated itself to those
who urged to turn to it. The mistresses' side defines itself as sharply;
but when all is said the two are one, the demand one and the same for
both. Men who work for wages work a specified number of hours, and if
they shirk or half fulfil their contract, find work taken from them.
Were the same arrangement understood as equally binding in domestic
service, thousands of self-respecting women would not hesitate to enter
it. Family life cannot always move in fixed lines, and hours must often
vary; but conscientious tally could be kept, and over-hours receive the
pay they have earned. A conscience on both sides would be the first
necessity; and it is quite certain that the master of the house would
require education as decidedly as the mistress, woman's work within home
walls being regarded as something continuous, indefinable, and not worth
formal estimate.
In spite of the enormous increase of wealth, the mass are happily what,
for want of a better word, must be called middle class. But one servant
or helper can usually be kept, and most often she is one who has used
our kitchens as kindergartens, adding fragments of training as she
passed from one to the other, ending often as fairly serviceable and
competent. Sure of her place she becomes tyrant, and nothing can alter
this relation but the appearance upon the scene of organized trained
labor, making a demand for absolute fairness of treatment and giving it
in return. Once certain that the reign of incompetence was over, the
present order of servers would make haste to seek training-schools, or
accept the low wages which would include personal training from the
mistress, promotion being conditioned upon faithful obedience to the new
order.
What are the stipulations which every self-respecting girl or woman has
the right to make? They are short and simple. They are absolutely
reasonable, and their adoption would be an education to every household
which accepted them:--
1. A definition of what a day's work means, and payment for all
over-time required, or certain hours of absolute freedom guaranteed,
especially where the position is that of child's nurse.
2. A comfortably warmed and decently furnished room, with separate beds
if two occupy it, and both decent place and appointments for meals.
3. The heaviest work, such as carrying coal, scrubbing pavements,
washing, etc., to be arranged for if this is asked, with a consequent
deduction in the wages.
4. No livery if there is feeling against it.
5. The privilege of seeing friends in a better part of the house than
the kitchen, and security from any espionage during such time, whether
the visitors are male or female. This to be accompanied by reasonable
restrictions as to hours, and with the condition that work is not to be
neglected.
6. Such a manner of speaking to and of the server as shall show that
there is no contempt for housework, and that it is actually as
respectable as other occupations.
Were such a schedule as this printed, framed, and hung in every kitchen
in the land, and its provisions honestly met, household revolution and
anarchy would cease, and the whole question settle itself quietly and
once for all. And this in spite of a thousand inherent difficulties
known to every housekeeper, but which would prove self-adjusting so soon
as it was learned that service had found a rational basis. At present,
with the majority of mistresses, it is simply unending struggle to get
the most out of the unwilling and grudging server, hopelessly
unreasonable and giving warning on faintest provocation. Yet these very
women, turning to factory life, where fixed and inexorable law rules
with no appeal, submit at once and become often skilled and capable
workers. It is certain that domestic service must learn organization as
every other form of industry has learned it, and that mistresses must
submit to something of the same training that is needed by the maid. Nor
need it be feared that putting such service on a strictly business basis
will destroy such kindliness as now helps to make the relation less
intolerable. On the contrary, with justice the foundation and a rigorous
fulfilment of duty on both sides will come a far closer tie than exists
save in rarest instances, and homes will regain a quality long ago
vanished from our midst. Such training will be the first step toward the
co-operation which must be the ultimate solution of many social
problems.
It has failed in many earlier attempts because personal justice was
lacking; but even one generation of sustained effort to simplify
conditions would insure not only a different ideal for those who think
at all, but the birth of something better for every child of the
Republic.
For the individual standing alone, hampered by many cares and distracted
over the whole household problem, action may seem impossible. But if
the most rational members of a community would band together, send
prejudice and tradition to the winds, and make a new declaration of
independence for the worker, it is certain that the tide would turn and
a new order begin. Till such united, concerted action can be brought
about there is small hope of reform, and it can come only through women.
Dismiss sentiment. Learn to look at the thing as a trade in which each
seeks her own advantage, and in which each gains the more clearly these
advantages are defined. It is a hard relation. It demands every power
that woman can bring to bear upon it. It is an education of the highest
faculties she owns. It means a double battle, for it is with ourselves
that the fight begins. Liberty can only come through personal struggle.
It is easy to die for it, but to live for it, to deserve it, to defend
it forever is another and a harder matter. Still harder is it to know
its full meaning and what it is that makes the battle worth fighting.
Union to such ends will be slow, but it must come:--
"Freedom is growth and not creation:
One man suffers, one man is free.
One brain forges a constitution,
But how shall the million souls be won?
Freedom is more than a revolution--
He is not free who is free alone."
Is this the word of a dreamer whose imagination holds the only work of
reconstruction, and whose hands are powerless to make the dream
reality? On the contrary, many years of experience in which few of the
usual troubles were encountered, added to that of others who had thought
out the problem for themselves, have demonstrated that reform is
possible. Precisely such conditions as are here specified have been in
practical operation for many years. The homes in which they have ruled
have had the unfailing devotion of those who served, and the experiment
has ceased to come under that head, and demonstrated that order and
peace and quiet mastery of the day's work may still be American
possessions. Count this imperfect presentation then as established fact
for a few, and ask why it is not possible to make it so for the many.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIRST.
END AND BEGINNING.
The long quest is over. It ends; and I turn at last from those women,
whose eyes still follow me, filled with mute question of what good may
come. Of all ages and nations and creeds, all degrees of ignorance and
prejudice and stupidity; hampered by every condition of birth and
training; powerless to rise beyond them till obstacles are removed,--the
great city holds them all, and in pain and want and sorrow they are one.
The best things of life are impossible to them. What is worse, they are
unknown as well as unattainable. If the real good of life must be
measured by the final worth of the thing we make or get by it, what
worth is there for or in them? The city holds them all,--"the great foul
city,--rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,--a ghastly heap of
fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore."
The prosperous have no such definition, nor do they admit that it can be
true. For the poor, it is the only one that can have place. We pack them
away in tenements crowded and foul beyond anything known even to
London, whose "Bitter Cry" had less reason than ours; and we have taken
excellent care that no foot of ground shall remain that might mean
breathing-space, or free sport of child, or any green growing thing.
Grass pushes its way here and there, but for this army it is only
something that at last they may lie under, never upon. There is no pause
in the march, where as one and another drops out the gap fills
instantly, every alley and by-way holding unending substitutes. It is
not labor that profiteth, for body and soul are alike starved. It is
labor in its basest, most degrading form; labor that is curse and never
blessing, as true work may be and is. It blinds the eyes. It steals away
joy. It blunts all power whether of hope or faith. It wrecks the body
and it starves the soul. It is waste and only waste; nor can it, below
ground or above, hold fructifying power for any human soul.
Here then we face them,--ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every
fibre,--and yet no count of such indictment alters our responsibility
toward them. Rather it multiplies it in always increasing ratio. For it
is our own system that has made these lives worthless, and sooner or
later we must answer how it came, that living in a civilized land they
had less chance than the heathen to whom we send our missionaries, and
upon whose occasional conversions we plume ourselves as if thus the
Kingdom of Heaven were made wider. If it is true that for many only a
little alleviation is possible, a little more justice, a little better
apportionment of such good as they can comprehend, it is also true that
something better is within the reach of all.
How then shall we define it, and what possibility of alteration for
either lives or conditions lies before us? Nothing that can be of
instant growth; and here lies the chief discouragement, since as a
people we demand instantaneousness, and would have seed, flower, and
fruit at the same moment. Admit patience, capacity to wait, and to work
while waiting, as the first term of the equation, and the rest arrange
themselves.
For the greater part of social reformers, co-operation has stood as the
initial and most essential step, as the fruit that could be plucked
full-grown; and experience in England would seem to have demonstrated
the belief as true. It is the American inability to wait that has proved
it untrue for us, and until very lately made failure our only record;
but there is a deeper reason than a merely temperamental one. The
abolition of the apprentice system, brought about by the greed of master
and men alike, has abolished training and slow, steady preparation for
any trade. An American has been regarded as quick enough and keen enough
to take in the essential features of a calling, as it were, at a glance,
and apprenticeship has been taken as practically an insult to national
intelligence. Law has kept pace with such conviction, and thus the door
has been shut in the face of all learners, and foreigners have supplied
our skilled workmen and work-women. The groundwork of any better order
lies, if not in a return to the apprentice system, then in a training
from the beginning, which will give to eye and hand the utmost power of
which they are capable. Industrial education is the foundation, and
until it has in its broadest and deepest sense become the portion of
every child born on American soil, that child has missed its birthright.
With the many who accept it, it stands merely as an added capacity to
make money, and if taken in its narrowest application this is all that
it can do. Were this all, it would be simply an added injustice toward
the degeneration that money-making for the mere sake of money inevitably
brings. But at its best, perfected as it has been by patient effort on
the part of a few believers, it is far more than this. Added power to
earn comes with it, but there comes also a love of the work itself, such
as has had no place since the days when the great guilds gave joyfully
their few hours daily to the cathedrals, whose stones were laid and
cemented in love and hope, and a knowledge of the beauty to come, that
long ago died out of any work the present knows. The builders had small
book knowledge. They could be talked down by any public-school child in
its second or third year. But they knew the meaning of beauty and order
and law; and this trinity stands to-day, and will stand for many a
generation to come, as an ideal to which we must return till like causes
work again to like ends. The child who could barely read saw beauty on
every side, and took in the store of ballad and tradition that gave life
to labor. We have parted with all this wilfully. To the Puritan all
beauty that hand of man could create was of the devil, and thus we
represent a consecrated ugliness, any departure from which is even now,
by some conscientious souls, regarded with suspicion.
The child, then, who can be made to understand that beauty and order and
law are one, has a new sense born in him. Life takes on a new aspect,
and work a new meaning. But the fourteen weeks per year of education, at
present required by our law as it stands in its application to children
who must work, has no power to bring such result. It begins in the
kindergarten, from which the poorest child takes home, even to the
tenement-house, something strong enough, when growth has come, to
abolish the tenement-house forever. No man who works to these ends has
gauged possibilities more wisely than Felix Adler, whose school shows us
something not yet attained by the many who, partially accepting his
methods, pronounce his theories dangerous and destructive to what must
be held sacred. However this may be, he and his band of co-workers have
proved, in seven years of unceasing struggle against heavy odds, that a
development is possible even for the tenement-house child, that
reconstructs the entire view of life and makes possible the end for
which all industrial training is but the preparation. It is in such
training that children, rich or poor, best learn the demand bound up in
living and working together, and find in the end that co-operation is
its natural out-growth. There is no renunciation of the home or
destruction of the truest home life. There is simply the abolition of
competition as any necessary factor in human progress, and the placing
of the worker beyond its power to harm.
Thus far we have left the bettering of social conditions chiefly to the
individual, and any hint of State interference carries with it the
opprobrium of socialism. Yet more and more for those who are unterrified
by names, the best in socialism offers itself as the sole way of escape
from monopolies and the stupidities and outrages of the present system.
No one panacea of any reformer fits the case or can alter existing
conditions. Only what man's own soul sees as good, and wills to possess,
is of faintest value to him. No attempt at co-operation can help till
the worker sees its power and use, and is willing to sacrifice where
sacrifice is necessary, to work and to wait in patience. Such power is
born in the industrial school in its largest sense,--the school that
trains heart and mind as well eye and hand, and makes the child ready
for the best work its measure of power can know. This we can give by
State or by individual aid, as the case may be, and every ward in the
city should own a sufficient number to include every child within it. A
check upon emigration would seem an imperative demand,--not prevention,
but some clause which might act to lessen the garbage-heaps dumped upon
our shores. Pauperism and disease have no rights as emigrants, and
eliminating these would make dealing with mere poverty a much more
manageable matter.
The schools exist, and, while painfully inadequate in number,
demonstrate what may be done in the future. Co-operation even for this
hasty people is almost equally demonstrated, as will be plain to those
who read two recent publications of the American Economic Association:
"Co-operation in a Western City," by Albert Shaw, and "Co-operation in
New England," by Edward W. Bemis. Minneapolis is the centre of the facts
given in the first-mentioned pamphlet, which is also the more valuable
of the two, not in execution but merely because it records a movement
which has ceased to be experimental; as the little history includes
every failure as well as the final success, and thus stands as the best
argument yet made for the cause.
Industrial education for the child of to-day; co-operation as the end to
be attained by the worker into which the child will grow,--in these two
factors is bound up much of the problem. They will not touch many whose
miserable lives are recorded in these pages, but they will forever end
any chance of another generation in like case. There are workers who
think, who are being educated by sharp conflict with circumstances, and
who look beyond their own present need to the future. These men and
women, crowded to the wall by the present system, are searching eagerly,
not as mere anarchists and destroyers, but as those who believe that
something better than destruction is possible.
It is these workers for whom the path must be made plain, and to whom we
are most heavily responsible. And this brings me to the final point
bound up indissolubly with the two already defined,--a change in our own
ideals. Such change must come before any school can accomplish its best
work, and till it has at least begun neither school nor system has
lasting power. In these months of search in which women of all ages and
grades have given in their testimony,--from the girl of fourteen earning
her two or three dollars a week in the bag-factory or as cash-girl, to
the woman stitching her remnant of life into the garments that by and by
her more fortunate sisters will find on the bargain counter,--I discover
not alone their ignorance and stupidity and grossness and wilful
blindness, but behind it an ignorance and stupidity no less dense upon
which theirs is founded,--our own. The visible wretchedness is so
appalling, the need for instant relief so pressing, that it is small
wonder that no power remains to look beyond the moment, or to
disentangle one's self from the myriad conflicting claims, and ask the
real meaning of the demand. Mile after mile of the fair islands once the
charm of the East River and the great Sound beyond are covered by
lazar-houses,--the visible signs in this great equation that fills the
page of to-day; the problem of human crime and disease and wretchedness
complicating itself with every addition, and no nearer solution than
when the city was but a handful of houses and poverty yet unknown.
We have made attempts here and there to limit the breeding ground; to
offer less fruitful soil to the spawn increasing with such frightful
rapidity, and demanding with every year fresh reformatories, larger
asylums and hospitals, more and more machinery of alleviation. Yet the
conviction strengthens that even when the tenement-house of to-day is
swept aside, and improved homes with decent sanitary conditions have
taken their place, that the root of the evil is even then untouched, and
that it lies not alone in their lives, but in our own. And so, as final
word, I say to-day to all women who give their lives to beneficence, and
plan ceaselessly and untiringly for better days, that no beneficence can
alter, no work of our hands or desire of our hearts bring the better day
we desire, till the foundations have been laid in something less
shifting than the sands on which we build.
The mission of alleviation, of protection, of care for the foulest and
lowest of lives, has had its day. It is time that this mass of effort
stirred against its perpetual reproduction, its existence, its ever more
and more shameless demands. An improved home goes far toward making
these tendencies less strong; it may even diminish the number of actual
transgressors; but what home, no matter how well kept, has or will have
power to alter the fact that in them thousands of women must still slave
for a pittance that borders always on that life limit fixed by the
political economists as the vanishing point in the picture of modern
life? Sunlight and air may take the place of the foulness now reigning
in the dens that many of them know as homes; but will either sun or air
shorten hours or raise wages, or alter the fact that not one in a
thousand of these women but has grounded her whole pitiful life on a
delusion,--a delusion for which we are responsible?
Year by year in the story of the Republic, labor has taken lower and
lower place. The passion for getting on, latent in every drop of
American blood, has made money the sole symbol of success, and freedom
from hand-labor the synonyme of happiness. The mass of illiterate,
unenlightened emigrants pouring in a steady stream through Castle Garden
have become our hands, and, as hands dependent on the heads of others,
have fallen into the same category as the slaves, whose possession
brought infinitely more degradation to owners than to owned. It is the
story of every civilized nation before its fall,--this exploitation of
labor, this degradation of the worker; and the story of hopeless decay
and collapse must be ours also, if different ideals do not rise to fill
the place of this Golden Calf to which all have bent the knee. There is
not a girl old enough to work at all who does not dream of a possible
future in which work will cease and ease and luxury take its place. The
boy content with a trade, the man or woman accepting simple living and
its limitations contentedly, is counted fool. To get money, and always
more and more money, is the one ambition; and in this mad rush toward
the golden fountain, gentle virtues are trampled under foot, and men
count no armor of honest thought worth wearing unless it be fringed with
bullion. The shop-girl must have her cotton velvet and her glass
substitutes for diamonds. The lines of caste are drawn as sharply with
her as in the ascending grades through which she hopes to pass. Labor is
curse; never the blessing that it may bear when accepted man's chief
good, and used as developing, not as destroying power.