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PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD.
BY HELEN CAMPBELL,
AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "THE WHAT-TO-DO-CLUB,"
"MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," "MISS MELINDA'S OPPORTUNITY,"
"ROGER BERKELEY'S PROBATION."
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1889.
_Copyright, 1889,_
BY HELEN CAMPBELL.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
_"But laying hands on another_
_To coin his labor and sweat,_
_He goes in pawn to his victim_
_For eternal years in debt."_
TO
F. W. P.
THE FRIEND IN WHOM JUSTICE AND TRUTH ARE SO DEEPLY
IMPLANTED THAT BOTH ARE INSTINCTS,
AND WHOSE MANHOOD HOLDS THE PROMISE OF WORK THAT WILL
GO FAR TOWARD FULFILLING THE DEEPEST WISH OF THE
GENERATION TO WHICH THE MAKER OF THESE PAGES BELONGS.
PREFACE.
The studies which follow, the result of fifteen months' observation
abroad, deal directly with the workers in all trades open to women,
though, from causes explained in the opening chapter, less from the side
of actual figures than the preceding volume, the material for which was
gathered in New York. But as months have gone on, it has become plain
that many minds are also at work, the majority on the statistical side
of the question, and that the ethical one is that which demands no less
attention. Both are essential to understanding and to effort in any
practical direction, and this is recognized more and more as
organization brings together for consultation the women who, having
long felt deeply, are now learning to think and act effectually. These
pages are for them, and mean simply another side-light on the labor
question,--the question in which all other modern problems are tangled,
and whose solving waits only the larger light whose first gleams are
already plain to see.
HELEN CAMPBELL.
HEIDELBERG, GERMANY,
_October, 1888._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA 7
II. IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE 19
III. THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL 31
IV. AMONG THE SWEATERS 42
V. CHILD OF THE EAST END 54
VI. AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS 66
VII. NELLY, A WEST END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE 77
VIII. LONDON SHIRT MAKERS 90
IX. THE TALE OF A BARROW 100
X. STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN 112
XI. LONDON SHOP-GIRLS 122
XII. FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE EEL-SOUP MAN IN THE BOROUGH 131
XIII. WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES 155
XIV. FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS 167
XV. FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS 176
XVI. THE CITY OF THE SUN 184
XVII. DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS 194
XVIII. A SILK WEAVER OF PARIS 203
XIX. IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC 214
XX. FROM FRANCE TO ITALY 224
XXI. PRESENT AND FUTURE 234
PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD.
CHAPTER I.
BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA.
With the ending of the set of studies among the working-women of New
York, begun in the early autumn of 1886 and continued through several
months of 1887, came the desire to know something of comparative
conditions abroad, and thus be better able to answer questions
constantly put, as to the actual status of women as workers, and of
their probable future in these directions. There were many additional
reasons for continuing a search, in itself a heart-sickening and utterly
repellant task. One by one, the trades open to women, over ninety in
number, had given in their returns, some of the higher order meaning
good wages, steady work and some chance of bettering conditions. But
with the great mass of workers, the wages had, from many causes, fallen
below the point of subsistence, or kept so near it that advance was
impossible, and the worker, even when fairly well trained, faced a
practically hopeless future.
The search began with a bias against rather than for the worker, and the
determination to do strictest justice to employer as well as employed.
Long experience had taught what was to be expected from untrained,
unskilled laborers, with no ambition or power to rise. Approaching the
subject with the conviction that most of the evil admitted to exist must
be the result of the worker's own defective training and inability to
make the best and most of the wages received, it very soon became plain
that, while this remained true, deeper causes were at work, and that
unseen forces must be weighed and measured before just judgment could be
possible. No denunciation of grasping employers answered the question
why they grasped, and why men who in private relations showed warm
hearts and the tenderest care for those nearest them became on the
instant, when faced by this problem of labor, deaf and blind to the
sorrow and struggle before them.
That the system was full of evils was freely admitted whenever facts
were brought home and attention compelled. But the easy-going American
temperament is certain that the wrong of to-day will easily become
righted by to-morrow, and is profoundly sceptical as to the existence of
any evil of which this is not true.
"It's pretty bad, yes, I know it's pretty bad," said one large employer
of women, and his word was the word of many others. "But we're not to
blame. I don't want to grind 'em down. It's the system that's wrong, and
we are its victims. Competition gets worse and worse. Machinery is too
much for humanity. I've been certain of that for a good while, and so,
of course, these hands have to take the consequences."
Nothing better indicates the present status of the worker than this very
phrase "hands." Not heads with brains that can think and plan, nor souls
born to grow into fulness of life, but hands only; hands that can hold
needle or grasp tool, or follow the order of the brain to which they are
bond-servants, each pulse moving to the throb of the great engine which
drives all together, but never guided by any will of brain or joy of
soul in the task of the day. There has been a time in the story of
mankind when hand and brain worked together. In every monument of the
past on this English soil, even at the topmost point of springing arch
or lofty pillar, is tracery and carving as careful and cunning as if all
eyes were to see and judge it as the central point and test of the labor
done. Has the nineteenth century, with its progress and its boast, no
possibility of such work from any hand of man, and if not, where has the
spirit that made it vanished, and what hope may men share of its return?
Not one, if the day's work must mean labor in its most exhausting form;
for many women, fourteen to sixteen hours at the sewing machine, the
nerve-force supplied by rank tea, and the bit of bread eaten with it,
the exhausted bodies falling at last on whatever may do duty for bed,
with no hope that the rising sun will bring release from trial or any
gleam of a better day.
With each week of the long search the outlook became more hopeless. Here
was this army crowding into the great city, packed away in noisome
tenement houses, ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre,
and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. If this
was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air,
free movement and natural growth. What barbarism at its worst could hold
such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its victims to more
lingering deaths? Admitting the almost impossibility of making them
over, incased as they are in ignorance and prejudice, this is simply
another count against the social order which has accepted such results
as part of its story, and now looks on, speculating, wondering what had
better be done about it.
The philanthropist has endeavored to answer the question, and sought out
many devices for alleviation, struggling out at last to the conviction
that prevention must be attempted, and pausing bewildered before the
questions involved in prevention. For them there has been active and
unceasing work, their brooms laboring as vainly as Mrs. Partington's
against the rising tide of woe and want and fruitless toil, each wave
only the forerunner of mightier and more destructive ones, while the
world has gone its way, casting abundant contributions toward the
workers, but denying that there was need for agitation or speculation as
to where or how the next crest might break. There were men and women who
sounded an alarm, and were in most cases either hooted for their pains,
or set down as sentimentalists, newspaper philanthropists, fanatics,
socialists,--any or all of the various titles bestowed freely by those
who regard interference with any existing order of things as rank
blasphemy.
Money has always been offered freely, but money always carries small
power with it, save for temporary alleviation. The word of the poet who
has sounded the depths of certain modern tendencies holds the truth for
this also:--
"Not that which we give, but what we share,
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who bestows himself, with his alms feeds three,
Himself, his hungering neighbor and me."
Yet it is the Anglo-Saxon conviction, owned by English and American in
common, and unshaken though one should rise from the dead to arraign it,
that what money would not do, cannot be done, and when money is rejected
and the appeal made for personal consideration of the questions
involved, there is impatient and instantaneous rejection of the
responsibility. Evolution is supposed to have the matter in charge, and
to deal with men in the manner best suited to their needs. If the
ancient creed is still held and the worshipper repeats on Sunday: "I
believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," he
supplements it on Monday and all other days, till Sunday comes again,
with the new version, the creed of to-day, formulated by a man who
fights it from hour to hour:
"I believe in Father Mud, the Almighty Plastic;
And in Father Dollar, the Almighty Drastic."
It is because these men and women must be made to understand; because
they must be reached and made to see and know what life may be counted
worth living, and how far they are responsible for failure to make
better ideals the ideal of every soul nearest them, that the story of
the worker must be told over and over again till it has struck home. To
seek out all phases of wretchedness and want, and bring them face to
face with those who deny that such want is anything but a temporary,
passing state, due to a little over-production and soon to end, is not a
cheerful task, and it is made less so by those who, having never looked
for themselves, pronounce all such statements either sensational or the
work of a morbid and excited imagination. The majority decline to take
time to see for themselves. The few who have done so need no further
argument, and are ready to admit that no words can exaggerate, or,
indeed, ever really tell in full the real wretchedness that is plain for
all who will look. But, even with them, the conviction remains that it
is, after all, a temporary state of things, and that all must very
shortly come right.
Day by day, the desire has grown stronger to make plain the fact that
this is a world-wide question, and one that must be answered. It is not
for a city here and there, chiefly those where emigrants pour in, and
so often, the mass of unskilled labor, always underpaid, and always near
starvation. It is for the cities everywhere in the world of
civilization, and because London includes the greatest numbers, these
lines are written in London after many months of observation among
workers on this side of the sea, and as the prelude to some record of
what has been seen and heard, and must still be before the record ends,
not only here, but in one or two representative cities on the continent.
London, however, deserves and demands chief consideration, not only
because it leads in numbers, but because our own conditions are, in many
points, an inheritance which crossed the sea with the pilgrims, and is
in every drop of Anglo-Saxon blood. If the glint of the sovereign and
its clink in the pocket are the dearest sight and sound to British eyes
and ears, America has equal affection for her dollars, in both countries
alike chink and glint standing with most, for the best things life
holds. It remains for us to see whether counteracting influences are
stronger here than with us, and if the worker's chance is hampered more
or less by the conditions that hedge in all labor. The merely
statistical side of the question is left, as in the previous year's
work, chiefly to those who deal only with this phase, though drawn upon
wherever available or necessary. There is, however, small supply. Save
in scattered trades-union reports, an occasional blue book, and here and
there the work of a private investigator, like Mr. Charles Booth, there
is nothing which has the value of our own reports from the various
bureaus of labor. The subject has until now excited little interest or
attention, save with a few political economists, and the band of
agitators who are the disciples, not of things as they are, but things
as they ought to be. One of the most admirable and well-officered
organizations in New York, "The Workingwoman's Protective Union," which
gave invaluable assistance last year, has only a small and feeble
imitation in London, in the Woman's Protective Union, founded by Mrs.
Peterson, and now under the admirable management of Miss Black, but
still struggling for place and recognition.
Thus it will be seen that the work to be done here is necessarily more
sketchy in character, though none the less taken from life in every
detail, the aim in both cases being the same,--to give, as far as
possible, the heart of the problem as it is seen by the worker, as well
as by the eyes that may have larger interpretation for outward phases.
The homes and daily lives of the workers are the best answers as to the
comfort-producing power of wages, and in those homes we are to find what
the wage can do, and what it fails to do, not alone for the East End,
but for swarming lanes and courts in all this crowded London. The East
End has by no means the monopoly, though novelists and writers of
various orders have chosen it as the type of all wretchedness. But
London wretchedness is very impartially distributed. Under the shadow of
the beautiful abbey, and the towers of archiepiscopal Lambeth Palace;
appearing suddenly in the midst of the great warehouses, and the press
of traffic in the city itself, and thronging the streets of that borough
road, over which the Canterbury pilgrims rode out on that immortal
summer morning,--everywhere is the swarm of haggard, hungry humanity.
No winter of any year London has known since the day when Roman walls
still shut it in, has ever held sharper want or more sorrowful need.
Trafalgar Square has suddenly become a world-wide synonym for the
saddest sights a great city can ever have to show; and in Trafalgar
Square our search shall begin, following one of the unemployed to the
refuge open to her when work failed.