"As respects ventilation, a properly regulated workshop is
the exception. The average room is either stuffy and close,
or hot and close, and even where windows abound they are
seldom opened. Toilet facilities are generally scant and
inadequate, a hundred workers being dependent sometimes on a
single closet or sink, and that, too often, out of order."
"Actual ill-treatment by employers seems to be infrequent;
_kindness, justice, and cordial relations are the rule_."
It would be interesting to discover the idea entertained at the
department as to what constitutes ill-treatment.
"Out of 18,000 women investigated, the largest number, 2,647
earn $200 and under $250 per annum, 2,377 earn from $250 to
$300. The concentration, it will be seen by consulting the
tables, comes on earnings ranging from $150 per year to $350
per year."
"_It is quite clear from the various investigations that
have been made, that there is little, if any, improvement in
the amount of earnings which a woman can secure by working
in the industries open to her; her earnings are not only
ridiculously low, but dangerously so._"
"The summary by cities, tables xxx, pp. 530 to 531, would
seem to indicate that _the majority are now in receipt of
fair wages when the whole body of working women is
considered_."
When such self-contradictory "information" is placed before the public
as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the
Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances
for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of
irrelevant reformation created chiefly within the last decade.
Certainly in comparison with the first report of Mr. Wright's
Massachusetts incumbency, the present one indicates a retrogression as
marked as it is injurious.
Defective as it is, however, this information is the latest that we
have, and it indicates terrible poverty among the better situated
manual workers.
The average wages of the employed during employment being decidedly
less than a dollar a day, it is not strange that homelessness grows
and the police department reports:--
"As will be seen, the enormous number of 4,649,660 cheap
lodgings were furnished during the year, to which should be
added the 150,812 lodgings furnished in the station-houses,
making a total of 4,800,472. If tenement-house life leads to
immorality and vice, certainly the fifty-eight
lodging-houses in the Eleventh Precinct, furnishing
1,243,200 lodgings in one year, must have the same or a
worse tendency. Reflection upon the figures contained in the
above will lead to the conclusion that we have a large
population of impecunious people (all males) which ought to
be regarded with some concern. It is shown above that an
average of 13,152 persons, without homes and the influence
of family, lodged nightly in the station-houses, and in
these poorly provided dormitories, an army of idlers willing
or forced. It is respectfully submitted that social
reformers would here find a field for speculation, if not
for considerable activity."
Into whose hands can our half a billion of added wealth have wandered,
that it leaves more than twelve thousand human beings homeless
throughout the year? And is the growth of such poverty, not
retrogression?
It is urged from time to time that New York is no typical study for
American conditions because of the immigration that forever flows
through it, and the abnormally large proportion of the "_un_fittest"
left as our residuum. But in comparison with the armies of the unfit
systematically produced by our industrial system, the stratum of
residuum deposited in the metropolis by the flood of immigration
rolling westward, is too trivial to disturb the equanimity of candid
observers. Only the perverted vision which leads New York's most
famous charitable institutions to imprison beggars and kidnap the
children of the very poor in the name of philanthropy, can so confuse
cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the nation's
work in an orderly manner, every recruit would be so much clear gain.
It is the disorganization of our moribund industrial system which
leaves no welcome for the immigrants save as the tenement-house agent
may bleed them, and the sweating contractor "grind their bones to make
his bread." It is this disorganization which turns the source of our
finest reinforcement into a means of demoralization and temporary
retrogression.
We have seen that in accumulated wealth, the city of New York
increased by nearly half a billion dollars in the past ten years. A
fair share of this material wealth was doubtless derived from the
application of electricity to human uses, for that was pre-eminently
the decade of electricity.
Yet, even in this respect the metropolis failed to hold its own. For,
while the substitution of electricity for horse power has gone rapidly
forward in the small cities of the West and South, New York has
suffered an extension of its slow, filthy, and pest-breeding
horse-car transportation. There can be little doubt that the
unspeakable state of the streets contributed largely to the deadliness
of the epidemic which raged at the close of 1889.
Nor was the electric lighting of New York more successfully developed
than the use of electricity for transportation. The last night of the
ten years found the city buried in stygian gloom, because the duty of
lighting its streets is still a matter of private profit; and the
insolent corporation which fattens upon this franchise surrendered the
privilege of murdering its linemen unpunished, only when its poles
were cut and its wires torn down. A more classic application of the
Vanderbilt motto in action it would be hard to find, or a more
thorough demonstration of the inadequacy of capitalism to rule the
genii itself has summoned. Characteristic of the low plane of humane
feeling in State and city is the substitution of the electrician for
the hangman in judicial murder, at a time when the effort is general
upon the Eastern Continent to abolish capital punishment.
As the application of electricity rose pre-eminently characteristic of
the past decade among the uses of science, so architecture towered
above all other arts. Yet, for one problem solved after the
magnificent fashion of the Brooklyn bridge and the Dacotahs, hundreds
of plans were devised with delicate ingenuity for filling up with
bricks and mortar the small remaining air space in the rear of
tenement blocks. And this noblest and most humane of all the arts was
degraded in the service of millionnaire land-owners and sub-letting
agents until the problem of to-day is, how to kennel the greatest mass
of human beings upon the least area with smallest allowance of air,
and light, and water, without infringing the building laws. One of the
simplest solutions is superimposing floor upon floor, so compelling
tired women and puny children to mount narrow, dark, and gloomy
stairs, and increasing to its maximum the danger of fire. The Egyptian
pyramids and the catacombs of Rome centuries ago were not poorer in
healthful light and air than were these homes of our fellow-citizens
in our own decade of retrogression.
But does this mean that our civilization is a failure, and the prime
of life past for the Republic? Far from it. It means, I take it, that
capitalism has done its work, and has become a hindrance, that the
old industrial and social forms are inadequate to the new requirements
and must be remodelled, and that promptly. It is now nearly half a
century since Karl Marx wrote the following words, but they apply to
the New York of to-day, as though he were among us and suffering with
us:--
"It is the sad side which produces the movement that makes
history by engendering struggle.... From day to day it
becomes more clear that the conditions of production under
which the capitalist class exists, are not of a homogeneous
and simple character, but are two-sided, duplex; and that in
the same proportion in which wealth is produced, poverty is
produced also; that in the same proportion in which there is
development of the productive forces, there is also
developed a force that begets repression; that these
conditions only generate middle class wealth by continuously
destroying the wealth of individual members of that class,
and by producing an ever-growing proletariat."