advantage of the newly arrived foreigners who do not understand the
language. Green hands, who have just arrived at Castle Garden, are pure
gold for the contractors. Full-grown men among these will receive,
probably, two dollars a week, but one case was discovered where a man
was only paid eighty cents for his week's labor. A fourteen-year-old
boy was found in a Jewish sweatshop, who, although he had been in the
shop eight months, was still receiving only his board. If that is not
slavery, what is it?
But now let us come to Boston. To begin with, I. S. Mullen, State
Inspector of factories and workshops, testified, before the committee
on public health, of the Massachusetts Legislature, on the 30th of last
March, that he had found two places in Boston as bad as anything he had
seen in New York. How much that means, you can imagine, after the
descriptions I have given.
The State inspectors of factories and public buildings, in their report
to Chief Wade of the Massachusetts district police, say that "the
confidential clerk of perhaps the largest concern in town assured us
that but a small part of their goods were made in New York, and that in
shops; that all of their nice work was done in Boston; admitted the
fact of tenement-house clothing, but thought the greater part of it was
worn in New York, and wished that its manufacture could be prohibited
by law. This gentleman, as well as some others questioned, believed
that relatively there was as much tenement-house work done in Boston as
in New York, and under nearly as unwholesome conditions."
[Illustration: PAUL, REVERE HOUSE, NORTH SQUARE.]
The _Boston Evening Record,_ of September 29, 1890, speaks as follows
of Boston sweating: "The shops are scattered all over the city proper,
and a visit to one is a visit to all. The cheapest shop in the city is
on lower Hanover Street. The work is done in a square, low-studded room
about twenty-four feet square. Within this space are sixteen women and
three men at work. There are also half a dozen sewing-machines, a large
stove (kept in full blast to heat the flat-irons, necessary at every
stage of clothing manufacture), two pressing-machines, and piles of
unfinished clothing. Two windows illumine the room, furnishing light
for the nineteen workers. Working hours are from seven A. M. to six P.
M., with no clipping of time at either end of the day. The proprietor
is a Hebrew. One of the operatives thus describes the life: 'We make
from two dollars and a half to four dollars a week, depending on how
strong we are, but none of us can make the last figure very long. The
air is bad, and the room is kept too hot. In the warm, summer days the
heat was something awful. Every little while there is a cut-down, and
about once in so often the boss fails, and leaves the girls in the
lurch about their pay.
"'Another bad thing is the "sample" game. A small lot of garments are
brought in, which, we are told, must be made up very carefully. We are
made to rip, and do work over, to suit the notions of the big firms,
who want the garments to send out on the road. It takes twice as long
to make such a coat, but we get no more for it. Of course the game is
played on us when the coats are not really samples. If we accidentally
scorch the cloth a little, in pressing, we have to pay for that.'"
An officer of the Operatives' Union puts the number of sweat-shops in
Boston at one hundred and fifty, but this does not include the smaller
tenement-house shops that are beginning to develop here very rapidly.
I have, myself, visited a number of these shops during the past few
weeks. I will describe a few of them very briefly. Here is one in two
rooms. There is no light except from the end of the room, which
contains twenty-three people, men, women, and little girls. I am
satisfied that some of the girls could not have been more than twelve
or thirteen. One of the women had a little baby which, though almost
entirely naked, was crying from the heat and poisonous air. The place
did not look as if it had been swept for weeks. The clothing, both
finished and unfinished, was piled up in every direction, and workers
walked over it with their sweaty feet, for they wore only such clothing
as was absolutely indispensable. The stench of the place was sickening
in the extreme.
I went into another place, where there were eighteen men and twelve
girls. As near as I could judge, the ages of the girls were from ten to
fifteen. The men were nearly all smoking, and that, together with the
heat from the fire necessary for the pressing, made an atmosphere that
was almost intolerable, even for a few moments. I was not astonished
that the girls looked pallid and sickly. There was only one filthy
water-closet for men and women.
[Illustration: REAR OF NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE.]
I was in a little tenement-house Jew shop where a man and four boys
were making knee pants in a bedroom. The clothing was piled upon the
bed, which was one of the filthiest assortments of tenement-house
bedding that I have ever seen--and that is saying a great deal. The
largest shop I visited was one in which there were seventy-nine people
employed. They occupied four rooms. The rooms were quite large, but
were filthy almost beyond description. The coal was piled up in huge
heaps on the floor; ashes, both in barrels and heaps, were scattered
about; clothing was flung over the floors everywhere; dirt and scraps
of cloth literally made a carpet for these rooms. These seventy-nine
people were about evenly divided between the sexes, and yet for all
this herd of humanity there was only one water-closet, the door of
which stood open, on the landing, and the poisonous stench filled all
the rooms; the floor about it was damp and filthy. How any woman or
girl could work in this shop, and retain her self-respect, I do not
understand. I estimated that at least twenty boys and girls of this
company were under fifteen; one little boy sitting on the floor hard at
work was almost crying with a headache. The men were smoking cigarettes
here, as in other places, and this added to the poisonous condition of
the air. The majority of these people could not speak English. Taken
altogether, they were a hopeless-looking lot. Many of them had a
brutal, hunted look in their faces.
Remember, this is not Glasgow, or London, or New York, but in the heart
of Boston, in the month of June, 1891. It is easy to say that these
people are foreigners, and that they had poor wages where they came
from; that they are probably as well off here as they were at home, and
that they are too ignorant and brutal to suffer, as more refined and
cultivated people would. Putting all other questions aside for a
moment, let us remember that these people are setting up a standard of
living in our midst, which, if permitted to become established, will
dictate its cruel laws to all the laboring people in the community.
[Illustration: COMMONWEALTH AVENUE.]
If this system is allowed to go on, there are people living in luxury,
who are indifferently pooh-poohing this whole question, whose
grandchildren will be starved to death in a sweat-shop.
No investment exacts such cruel usury as indifference to injustice. A
wrong, uncared for in a North End tenement house will avenge itself,
sooner or later, on Beacon Hill or Commonwealth Avenue.
I thank God for every indication of discontent, on the part of laboring
men and women, at conditions which cramp or fetter the free utterance
of their manhood or womanly glory. In that divine discontent is the
hope of the race. Our own Lowell sings:--
"The hope of truth grows stronger day by day.
I hear the soul of man around me waking,
Like a great sea its frozen fetters breaking,
And flinging up to heaven its sunlit spray,
Tossing huge continents in scornful play,
And crushing them with din of grinding thunder
That makes old emptinesses stare in wonder.
The memory of a glory passed away
Lingers in every heart, as in the shell
Resounds the by-gone freedom of the sea.
And every hour new signs of promise tell
That the great soul shall once again be free;
For high and yet more high the murmurs swell
Of inward strife for truth and liberty."
V.
THE RELATION OF WAGES TO MORALS.
"When the toiler's heart you clutch,
Conscience is not valued much;
He recks not a bloody smutch
On his gold;
Everything to you he defers,
You are potent reasoners;
At your whisper Treason stirs,
Hunger and Cold!"
--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
When Henry W. Grady, the brilliant Southern orator, was in Boston on
his last visit, only a few weeks before his sad and untimely death, he
charmed us all by his entrancing word-picture of a happy country home.
The fields, the lowing kine, the well-appointed farmhouse, the noble
farmer, the contented matron, the dutiful children, the hospitable
welcome of their guest, the cheerful and reverent evening worship--all
these and more stand out on the glowing canvas under his words, as I
have myself seen them in real life a thousand times. About such a home,
and the toilers that support it, there is a halo of glory. There is,
however, a great deal said about the dignity of labor which is nothing
more than oratorical commonplace--the meaningless froth of the
rhetorician. There is no dignity about labor in itself. What is there
about piling bricks on top of each other, or mixing mortar, or sewing
blue denim into overalls, or trading earthen jars for nickel coin, that
has about it any inherent dignity? It is only as there is mixed with
the mortar, or builded with the bricks, the holy cement of a moral
purpose; only as there is stitched into the cloth the diviner thread of
hopeful love; only as the deed gathers the aroma of an aspiring human
life, is it a dignified transaction. But when you make of the laborer a
slave, degrade his work to a mere fight for bread, harass him by
continual debt, put him in a vile tenement house that smothers all holy
ambition, labor has no longer dignity, it smells rather of the dungeon
and the pit.
[Illustration: THE FIND.]
Honest labor, continued through reasonable hours, paid at a rate which
assures a wholesome support, is ennobling; but overwork, that is
hopeless of comfortable reward, is degrading in the extreme. On the
continent of Europe, where men and women work in the factories for
fourteen and sixteen hours in a day, the laborers are reduced simply to
machines. They have a wooden look, when you meet them on the streets,
that is startling to an American observer. Every observant European
travelling in this country notices the difference in the intelligence
of the average countenance of American working-people, both among men
and women. But how long can we expect that to last if the dominion of
the sweater is to spread in our midst? Reduce wages to the point where
the laborer has to either remain at the shop or take his work home and
work into the night, and drive it on through Sunday as well, and you
simply brutalize the workman. It is idle, and pharisaical as well, for
us to shrug our shoulders and say this is not a question for the
pulpit. So intimate is the relation between the body and the soul, that
every question which has to do with the feeding or clothing of a human
body is, at the last analysis, a moral question. The great generals of
history have understood that the moral force of their armies depended
largely upon the provision wagon. Frederick the Great once wrote:
"Where one desires a solid basis for the good organization of an army,
it is necessary to have regard to the stomach." Napoleon once said:
"The soldier has his heart in his abdomen;" and Von Moltke adds his
testimony: "In a campaign no food is costly except that which is bad."
One of the greatest of physiologists, Moleschott, says: "Courage,
readiness, and activity depend in a great measure upon a healthy and
abundant nourishment. Hunger makes heart and head empty. No force of
will can make up for an impoverished blood, a badly nourished muscle,
or an exhausted nerve." All these tend to the one conclusion, that the
moral and intellectual life is very largely subject to physiological
conditions. A man, of course, may be a scoundrel and well-fed; but, on
the other hand, poor food and undue exposure to cold and heat have
tremendous influence in breaking down the resistance-power against
temptation to evil. Courage is the safeguard both of truth and honesty.
Break down a man's courage by overwork, bad food, and poisonous air,
and you have opened the way for lying, theft, and a whole brood of
vicious tendencies. You may find this strongly illustrated in Hugo's
story of Jean Valjean, who in his despair begins his criminal career by
stealing a loaf of bread to keep his sister's children from starving.
We get so in the habit of thinking of drunkenness as the chief cause of
poverty, as it undoubtedly is,--for when a man drinks to excess his
whole character falls to pieces like a child's house of cards,--that we
forget, or fail to perceive, the companion fact, that poverty is, in
turn, a great and serious factor in the spread of drunkenness.
When a man or woman is physically exhausted, there is a natural craving
for stimulant, and the power of resistance is reduced to the lowest
point, if not to zero. It will not do for us to forget that the drink
habit is often a symptom of exhaustion. Here are a man and a woman who
receive such low wages that they are driven into unhealthy quarters.
They ought to have four or five rooms in order to the least approach to
wholesome living; but poverty herds them in two, or it may be only one,
for within the past month I have myself seen many families of father
and mother and as many as five children packed into one little room, in
one case only seven by nine feet. The air is poisonous; and, after the
rent is paid, the food-money is insufficient, and sickness is the
result. I do not mean that large numbers of people in Boston are
literally starved to death for lack of bread; but I do mean that
thousands of men and women and children in this city are compelled to
eat such a quality of food that the result is a condition of mind and
body which is subject to an insatiable thirst for strong drink, and
makes drunkards of those who would otherwise be sober people. In
company with two gentlemen I was examining a filthy court a few weeks
ago, when, in the rear of a bake-shop under a shed, we noticed some
curious machinery, and were looking at it rather inquisitively when a
young lad came up out of the bakery in the cellar, and, in answer to
our inquiries, said in a matter-of-course way that it was a mill for
grinding old bread and stale crackers into flour, which was again baked
into a cheaper class of bread. This grade of flour may make a very
nourishing food, but the incident left a most unpleasant taste in my
mouth.
[Illustration: THE SOUTH END MISSION.]
It is a commonplace thing, I know, to say that the American home is the
strongest fortress of our civilization. It is one of those things,
however, that needs to be said over and over again. Before the church
or the state there must be the home. Destroy that, and the whole fabric
of our civilization will come crashing to the ground in a common ruin.
But the reduction of wages below the comfort point means, inevitably,
the deterioration of the home. The father and mother and the children
must know each other, if the home is to be welded together with mutual
love. Acquaintance of that character, however, requires that they shall
be together under such conditions that they may come to enjoy the gifts
and talents that each possess. But wages are being reduced to the point
where the home is only a sleeping-barrack and a lunch-counter for
supper and breakfast. Remember that poor wages mean long hours; and
long hours that exhaust all the energy of the laborer mean ignorance;
and ignorance, when it is finished, means immorality.
There is only about so much vital force in the average human being. If
all this force is put into one's daily toil, there is none left for
helpful conversation, for sympathetic communion at home, for uplifting
reading, or for worship. Persevere in that course, and you reach
barbarism: the road faces that way.
Insufficient wages have their relation to the demoralization of
laboring-people in many ways that are not perceived by people who look
no deeper than the surface. The city abounds in organized firms of
sharpers who prey upon the necessities of the hard-pinched laborer. If
you will examine a copy of "The Banker and Tradesman," published in
this city, and look down the column of chattel-mortgages, for any week,
you will see a very innocent-appearing column, to the unadvised, but
one that is full of devilish wickedness to a man who has been behind
the scenes. If there be anything in Boston that can rival the cruelty
of the tenement-house sweat-shop, you will find it in the dens of some
chattel-mortgage sharks, whose business methods I have investigated.
Here is a woman who made her living by making overalls at five cents a
pair. Times, of course, were always hard with her. Her husband was out
of work a good part of the time. At a period when they were in a
specially hard place, they borrowed ten dollars of one of these human
sharks. They were to pay two dollars a month interest on it. If at any
time it ran over two or three days and the interest was not paid, so
that the collector had to call for it, he charged and collected two
dollars extra for calling. I should have stated that this money was
secured by a chattel-mortgage upon every article of household furniture
they possessed. These mortgages are ironclad, and put the people at the
mercy of the man who holds them. In the course of fifteen months, under
cover of this loan of ten dollars, this firm managed to squeeze forty
dollars out of the hard earnings of these people; and then they came to
foreclose the mortgage and take away the furniture, and would have
removed every household article they possessed, had not the
police-officer on the beat, a man of noble heart and generous
instincts, stepped in and agreed to be responsible personally for the
amount. Here is another case, all of the papers of which are now in my
hands: A man and his wife borrowed twenty dollars; the firm charged two
dollars for making out the papers, so that the note read twenty-two
dollars. The agent called on them once, and charged two dollars for
that. In the course of ten months they paid twenty dollars interest.
The matter then came to the attention of the secretary of a charitable
association, who forced the brokers to settle up the case for six
dollars. I know of another case of a Swede family who "got behind," and
could not pay the rent. Sickness came upon them, and they borrowed
fifty dollars. In a little over a year they paid sixty dollars
interest, but the principal had not been reduced a dollar.
Some of the instalment firms are just as bad, and many times are in
league with these sharpers. A case has come to my knowledge where a man
with a wife and family of five children bought furniture amounting to a
hundred and thirty-five dollars. After he had paid seventy dollars, he
was taken sick and had to go to the hospital. The wife was unable to
meet the instalments promptly, and the firm threatened to take away her
furniture. She asked the agent of a charitable organization to
intercede for her. This gentleman wrote to the firm and begged them to
postpone their foreclosure, and mercifully give the poor family a
little more time. But this they absolutely refused to do, and came in
the midst of the raw winds of March, and took all the household
furniture away, including the stove and the loaf of bread in the oven.
These are not hearsay stories, but facts that can be proved by
undoubted evidence.
Women are the greatest sufferers from depreciation of wages.
Commissioner Carroll Wright's report on the working-women in great
cities, given to the public two years since, contains some interesting
facts. The investigation on which the report is based covered
twenty-two of the larger cities of the United States, and three hundred
and forty-two distinct industries, excluding the professional and
semi-professional callings, such as teaching, stenography, typewriting,
and telegraphy. The total number of women individually interviewed was
17,427.
This is only six or seven per cent of the whole number of women engaged
in the class of work indicated, but the Commissioner declares that the
investigation is representative so far as the number of women whose
affairs enter into it is to be considered. The average age of the women
is given as twenty-two years and seven months, though the concentration
is greatest at the age of eighteen.... The general average at the
beginning of work is put at fifteen years and four months.
A great majority of the women interviewed are single, and the average
weekly earnings for the cities, as a whole, are five dollars and
twenty-four cents. Take your pencil and count it up--room-rent, board,
and clothing--and see how much you have left for books or music,
recreation or religion.
The twentieth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor
Statistics for last year shows not only the poor pay of women, but the
cruel and unjust disparity of wages between men and women doing the
same work. Beginning with the lowest rate of wages, for the first
comparison of relative male and female pay, it appears that of actual
wages paid to 248,200 employees of both sexes, 8.99 per cent of all
males receive less than five dollars a week, 4.85 per cent less than
six dollars, and 6.77 per cent less than seven dollars. That is, about
20 per cent of all males average less than one dollar per day. But the
females working at this low scale of wages comprise 72.94 per cent of
all the workers. In the higher scale of wages, 63.78 per cent of all
the males receive a dollar and a half or more per day. But only a
little more than 10 per cent of the females employed are paid wages as
high. Out of 7,257 receiving twenty dollars a week and over, only 268
are women. But the cruelest part of all this is that women, standing
side by side with men in the same shops and stores, are paid far less
wages for the same work. This is an aristocracy of sex that shames and
belies all our claims to democracy.
This injustice in the wages of women is already beginning to bear a
fearful fruitage. Miss Alice S. Woodbridge, the secretary of the
Working-women's Society of New York, after a recent tour of
investigation, sums up the result of her observations in the following
words: "The wages paid to women average between four and four and
one-half dollars per week, and are often reduced by unreasonable and
excessive fines. The little cash-girls do not average two dollars a
week. In one large house the average wages for saleswomen and
cash-girls is two dollars and forty cents a week. In many fashionable
houses the saleswomen are not allowed to leave the counter between the
hours of eleven A. M. and three P. M., except for lunch, and if a
saleswoman has a customer when the lunch-hour arrives, she is obliged
to remain and wait on the customer, and the time so consumed is
deducted from lunch-time.
"If mistakes are made, they are charged to the saleswomen and
cash-girls. Generally, the goods are placed in a bin and slide down to
the floor below. If a check is lost, the goods are charged to the
saleswoman, though it may be the fault of the shipping-clerk. In some
stores the fines are divided between the superintendent and the
time-keeper. In one store where these fines amounted to three thousand
dollars, the superintendent was heard to reproach the time-keeper with
not being strict enough. Men's wages are very low," says Miss
Woodbridge, "but it seems that they can not fall below the point where
existence is possible. Women's wages, however, have no low limit, since
the paths of shame are always open to them. Cases might be cited where
frail, delicate women, unable to exist on the salaries they earn, are
forced to crime or suicide. The story of Mrs. Henderson, who threw
herself from the attic window of a lodging-house some time ago, is the
story of many another.