initial commit of ebook 6802HEADmain

5 files changed, 5113 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/6802.txt b/6802.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9750546
--- /dev/null
+++ b/6802.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5097 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of White Slaves, by Louis A Banks
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: White Slaves
+
+Author: Louis A Banks
+
+Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6802]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on January 26, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE SLAVES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steve Schulze, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+This file was produced from images generously made available by the
+CWRU Preservation Department Digital Library
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WHITE SLAVES
+
+OR
+
+THE OPPRESSIONS OF THE WORTHY POOR
+
+BY REV. LOUIS ALBERT BANKS, D.D.
+
+
+
+
+To My Father and Mother,
+
+Who instilled into my mind and heart, in the days of a happy boyhood,
+their own love for liberty and hatred of oppression, this volume is
+gratefully dedicated.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE MERCY AND HELP DEPARTMENT OF THE EPWORTH LEAGUE
+
+Mr. Edison tells us that ninety per cent of the energy that there is in
+coal is lost in the present method of converting it into a usable
+force. May I, without being considered a croaker, say that almost the
+same amount of spiritual power goes to waste in our average church
+life? One is startled at times as he notes the manifestations of fervor
+and warmth in the devotional meetings of the present day, and the
+meagre results that follow in the transformation of society into the
+likeness of the kingdom of heaven. Exactly what we have to do, however,
+is to help hasten the answer to the prayer our Lord taught us, "Thy
+will be done on earth as it is in heaven," and not to be forever
+seeking to build tabernacles on some Mount of Transfiguration.
+
+This book of Dr. Banks's is a positive stimulus to this work of social
+transformation. The young men and women of our Epworth League could not
+do better than to carefully and thoughtfully study its vivid pictures
+of every-day scenes in our great, and even in our lesser, cities.
+
+Such study will open their eyes to sad deformities in their own
+communities, to which too many have become strangely indifferent
+through custom and wont. True, it is not pleasant to consider these
+distressing matters; but is it the business of the Christian to avoid
+that which is unpleasant? Consideration leads to sympathy, and sympathy
+wonderfully quickens the inventive faculties; and the aroused intellect
+and active affection are leavening forces that alter social conditions
+always for the better.
+
+I take great pleasure, therefore, in commending this work, because it
+stirs all who read it. It may make you indignant. What of it? Would
+that more were alive enough to be indignant with the indignation of our
+Lord at the forces of unbrotherliness at work in our midst! It will do
+more than rouse your indignation; it will help you to utter the prayer
+that gave the accent to the life of Paul: "Lord, what wilt thou have
+_me_ to do?" When in works of Mercy and Help our tens of thousands of
+Epworth Leaguers are loyally living this prayer, the problem of Edison,
+as applied to spiritual dynamics, will be solved, and the latent forces
+of spiritual energy used to their utmost. Then, as slavery has passed
+away, war and tyranny and idleness and poverty will be no more, and the
+end to which Christ leads us, and for which He died, will be attained.
+
+WILLIAM INGRAHAM HAVEN,
+
+_Vice-President for Mercy and Help Department_.
+
+INWOOD LODGE, PINE ISLAND N.H. _August_ 1893
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+This volume had its origin in experiences which came to me in the daily
+duties of a city pastorate. The inadequate wages received by some of
+the members of my own congregation, and the impoverished and unhealthy
+surroundings of many of the poor people who came for me to christen
+their children, pray with their sick, or bury their dead, so aroused my
+sympathy for the victims, and my indignation against the cruel or
+indifferent causes of their misery, that I determined upon a thorough
+and systematic investigation of the conditions of life among the worthy
+Boston poor. By the word "worthy" I do not mean to indicate a class of
+saints, but the poor people of the city who are willing and anxious to
+exchange honest hard work for their support. I have not, in the series
+of studies here presented, entered into a discussion of the vicious and
+criminal classes. I have tried to perform, as it seemed to me, a far
+more important task--to make a plea for justice on behalf of the
+crushed, and often forgotten, victims of greed, who work and starve in
+their cellars and garrets rather than beg or steal.
+
+The larger part of the matter contained in these pages was originally
+delivered in a series of discourses from the pulpit of St. John's
+Methodist Episcopal Church, South Boston, and retains here the direct
+form of the spoken address.
+
+I desire to make a personal acknowledgment to some who have given me
+great assistance in making the investigations, the results of which are
+here recorded. I am greatly indebted to Mr. B. O. Flower, Editor of
+_The Arena_, for many kindnesses, and especially for the use of several
+interesting illustrations originally prepared for the magazine over
+which he so ably and gracefully presides. The Rev. Walter J. Swaffield,
+of the Boston Baptist Bethel, the Rev. C. L. D. Younkin, of the North
+End Mission, the Rev. Geo. L. Small, of the Mariners' House, the Rev.
+John G. May, of the Italian Mission, and that indefatigable reformer,
+Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln, have each put me under great obligations by
+their unwearying kindness and willing assistance. I am also greatly
+indebted to Mr. Sears Gallagher, the brilliant young South Boston
+artist, and to the veteran photographer of Boston Highlands, Mr. W. H.
+Partridge, for many courtesies in connection with the illustrations
+which illumine these chapters.
+
+LOUIS ALBERT BANKS. BOSTON, _September_ 15, 1891.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. THE WHITE SLAVES OF THE BOSTON "SWEATERS"
+
+II. LETTER OF CRITICISM
+
+III. REPLY TO A CRITICISM ON "THE WHITE SLAVES OF THE BOSTON SWEATERS"
+
+IV. THE PLAGUE OF THE SWEAT-SHOP
+
+V. THE RELATION OF WAGES TO MORALS
+
+VI. THE WAGES AND TEMPTATIONS OF WORKING-PEOPLE
+
+VII. BOSTON'S UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
+
+VIII. SOCIAL MICROBES IN BOSTON TENEMENT HOUSES, AND HOW TO DESTROY
+      THEM
+
+IX. OLD WORLD TIDES IN BOSTON
+
+X. OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, THE BOSTON PAUPERS
+
+XI. COMMENT ON "OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, THE BOSTON PAUPERS"
+
+XII. THE GOLD GOD OF MODERN SOCIETY
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PORTRAIT OF AUTHOR
+PORTUGUESE WIDOW IN ATTIC
+PORTUGUESE WIDOW AND CHILDREN
+LITTLE CHILDREN FINISHING PANTS
+INVALID IN CHAIR
+POSTAL UNIFORMS
+A TENEMENT-HOUSE COURT
+SUNDAY ON NORTH STREET
+CLARK'S MISSION
+NORTH END JUNK SHOP
+HOME OF THE MATHERS
+THE PEANUTTER
+INSIDE A SWEAT-SHOP
+PAUL REVERE HOUSE, NORTH SQUARE
+REAR OF NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE
+COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
+DRYING "THE FIND"
+THE NORTH END MISSION
+A BOSTON "BRIDGE OF SIGHS"
+COURT OFF NORTH STREET
+CELLARWAY LEADING TO UNDERGROUND APARTMENTS
+SICK MAN IN UNDERGROUND APARTMENT
+AN ANCIENT TENEMENT
+ITALIAN FRUIT-VENDERS AT HOME
+COCKROACHES BY FLASH-LIGHT
+BANANA SELLER
+UNDERGROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS
+TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
+EXTERIOR OF A NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE
+WIDOW AND TWO CHILDREN IN UNDERGROUND TENEMENT
+THE BANK OF THE UNFORTUNATE
+OUT OF WORK
+A CHEAP LODGING-HOUSE
+THE "GOOD LUCK" TENEMENT HOUSE
+THE SAND GARDEN
+CHRIST CHURCH TOWER
+ON THE CUNARDER
+ON THE WAY TO THE RABBI
+PASSING THE QUARANTINE DOCTOR
+SURGICAL THEOLOGY
+BUILDING USED BY THE BRITISH AS A HOSPITAL
+VICTORIA SQUARE
+OAK DOOR AT ENTRANCE
+READING-ROOM AT FACTORY
+FERRIS BROTHERS' CORSET FACTORY
+QUARTER SECTION OF ONE OF THE WORK ROOMS
+THE QUEEN OF THE DUMP
+TRAMPS WOMEN'S
+HOSPITAL WARD AT LONG ISLAND
+GETTING A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
+ATTIC AT RAINSFORD ISLAND
+MARINERS' HOME
+CHILDREN PLAYING IN COPP'S HILL BURYING-GROUND
+DIGGING IN THE ASH-BARRELS IN WINTER
+FOUR SHINERS
+SOUTH BOSTON RAG-PICKERS
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE WHITE SLAVES OF THE BOSTON "SWEATERS".
+
+
+  "Hard work is good an' wholesome, past all doubt;
+  But 'tain't so, ef the mind gits tuckered out."
+
+--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: _Biglow Papers_.
+
+A wise man of the old time, after a tour of observation, came home to
+say, "So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done
+under the sun: and behold the tears of such, as were oppressed, and
+they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was
+power; but they had no comforter." If this report had been written by
+one who had been climbing with me through the tenement houses of not
+less than a score of Boston streets, conversing with the sewing-women,
+looking on their poverty-lined faces and their ragged children,
+breathing the poisonous air of the quarters where they work, and
+listening to their heart-rending stories of cruelty and oppression, it
+would be an appropriate summary of our observation. It is my purpose,
+at this time, to take you with me on a tour of observation. As
+well-lighted streets are better than policemen to insure safety and
+good order, so I believe that the best possible service I can render
+the public is to turn on the light, and tell, as plainly and simply as
+I can, the story of what I have seen and heard and smelled in the white
+slave-quarters, which are a disgrace to our fair city. I shall confine
+myself at this time entirely to the work of women and children in their
+own homes. Most of this work is parcelled out to them by middlemen who
+are known as "sweaters." That word sweater is not in the old
+dictionaries. It is a foul word, born of the greed and infernal lust
+for gold which pervade the most reckless and wicked financial circles
+of our time. The sweater takes large contracts and divides it out among
+the very poor, reducing the price to starvation limits, and reserving
+the profits for himself.
+
+Some of the women whose story I shall tell do not work for sweaters,
+but are treated almost as badly by the powerful and wealthy firms who
+employ them. In these cases the firm itself has learned the sweater's
+secret, and through an agent of its own is sweating the life-blood out
+of these half-starved victims.
+
+Let us begin near at home with a South Boston case, which came to my
+notice through the dispensary doctor for the district. It is a widow
+with one child--a little boy scarcely three years old. The child is
+just recovering from a troublesome sickness, through which the doctor
+became acquainted with her. She has been sewing for a good while for
+one of the largest and most respectable dry-goods houses on Washington
+Street--a firm whose name is a household word throughout New England.
+Her sewing has been confined to two lines--cloaks and aprons. For some
+time she has been making white aprons--a good long apron, requiring a
+yard, perhaps, of material; it is hemmed across the bottom and on both
+sides, the band or "apron string" is hemmed on both sides, and then
+sewed on to the apron, making six long seams. For these she is paid
+fifteen cents _a dozen_! And besides that, this great, rich firm, whose
+members are rolling in wealth and luxury, charges this poor widow
+fifteen cents expressage on her package of ten dozen aprons, so that
+for making one hundred and twenty aprons, such as I have described, she
+receives, net, one hundred and thirty-five cents! If she works from
+seven o'clock in the morning until eleven o'clock at night, she can
+make four dozen; but, with the care of her child, she is unable to
+average more than three dozen, for which, after the expressage is taken
+out, she receives forty cents a day for the support of herself and
+child.
+
+Her rent for the one little room is one dollar per week. It is idle to
+say that this firm is compelled to do this by competition, for the
+material and making of these aprons cost less than ten cents, and the
+firm retails them ordinarily at _twenty-five cents apiece_. On cloaks
+she did better, receiving from fifty to seventy-five cents apiece, she
+furnishing her own sewing-silk and cotton. On these she could make, by
+working from seven A.M. till eleven P.M., nearly a dollar a day, but
+she could never get more than six cloaks a week, so that the income for
+the week was about the same.
+
+[ILLUSTRATION: PORTUGUESE WIDOW IN ATTIC.]
+
+Now come with me a little farther around the harbor. Let us climb up
+three flights, to a little attic suite of two rooms, so low at the side
+that, with my length of anatomy, I have to keep well to the middle of
+the room in order to stand upright. Here live a Portuguese mother and
+five children, the oldest thirteen, the youngest not yet three, a poor,
+deformed, little thing that has consumption of the bowels, brought on
+by scanty and irregular food. Its tiny legs are scarcely thicker than
+my thumb, and you cannot look at its patient, wasted, little face, that
+looks old enough to have endured twenty-five years of misery, instead
+of three, without the heartache. I ask the mother how she earns her
+living, and she points to a package that has just come in. Picking it
+up, and untying the strings, I find there six pairs of pants, cut out
+and basted up, ready for making. Looking at the card, we are astonished
+to find that it bears the name of one of the largest firms in the city
+of Boston, a firm known, perhaps, as widely as any. Three pairs of
+these pants are _custom-made_; they are fashionable summer trousers,
+with the names and addresses of the men for whom they are made tacked
+on them. The other three pairs are stamped with "New York" as customer,
+from which we infer that they are made for a New York house, the Boston
+firm acting as sweater. This woman and her little children must finish
+these pants by the same hour to-morrow, when the messenger from the
+store will bring a new lot and take these away. She receives _ten cents
+a pair_--three pairs being _custom-made_ pants! In order to finish the
+six pairs in the twenty-four hours, she must get to work at six in the
+morning, and improve every available moment until eleven or twelve in
+the evening, and sometimes, if the sick child is fretful, until one
+o'clock in the morning. Her wages for this tremendous strain that is
+wearing her very life away, until she looks almost as frail as her
+dying child, is _sixty cents!_ Her rent for these two small attic
+pockets is one dollar and fifty cents per week. She has one bed for
+herself and five children. Only through the aid of the Boston Baptist
+Bethel is she able to keep up the struggle. And yet, O my brothers!
+this is in sight of the old North Church, and the tower where they hung
+the lanterns for a signal to Paul Revere, when he rode through the
+darkness to arouse the Fathers to fight against oppression. God help us
+to hang another light for liberty in the midst of this cruel slavery!
+
+Perhaps you are tired now, and want to rest, but I am insatiable, and
+will go on. Let me give you the record of six families found in the
+same tenement.
+
+Family No. 1. They are Italians. The wife and mother is finishing cheap
+overcoats at four cents apiece. She can finish from eight to ten in a
+day. She has two finer coats, lined with handsome satin; of these she
+can complete only five a day, and receives eight cents apiece. There
+are three in the family, and they pay a dollar and a half per week for
+their one room. I asked about the husband, and a neighbor woman from
+the next room remarked contemptuously, "He is no good."
+
+No. 2. These are Poles. The woman makes knee pants of grammar-schoolboy
+size; she receives sixteen cents a dozen pairs. Two dozen are as many
+as she ever gets done in a day.
+
+No. 3. They are Italians here, and are at work on knee pants. This
+woman receives sixteen cents a dozen pairs for most of them, but for
+some extra nice ones she gets eighteen cents a dozen. She has two dozen
+brought to her from the sweater's shop every day about two o'clock. She
+works from two in the afternoon until ten at night, and from six in the
+morning until noon the next day, to complete her allowance, for which
+she receives from thirty-two to thirty-six cents. The rent is a dollar
+and seventy-five cents per week; she has two children.
+
+No. 4. This woman makes men's pants at twelve cents a pair. Formerly,
+when she was stronger, she could drive herself through six pairs a day;
+but now, with a little babe to look after, she can get only four pairs
+done. The room is intolerably dirty; but how can you have the heart to
+blame her?
+
+No. 5. Polish Jews. The woman makes knee pants, working from seven in
+the morning till ten o'clock at night, and nets from twenty-seven to
+forty-four cents a day.
+
+No. 6. Italians. This woman is an expert seamstress. She is finishing
+men's coats at six cents apiece; and with nothing to bother her,
+working sixteen hours a day, she makes fifty-four cents. The rent for
+the narrow little back room is one dollar and thirty-five cents per
+week.
+
+If you want variety, we will climb four flights of stairs, with half
+the plastering knocked off the walls, and talk with an English woman.
+She is working on fine cloth pants; she gets thirteen cents a pair; by
+working till very late in the evening, she can complete four pairs a
+day, and thinks it would be almost a paradise if she could make her
+fifty-two cents every day; but it is one of the characteristics of a
+sweater to systematically keep all his people hungry for work, and she
+seldom is able to get more than twelve pairs a week. She lives alone in
+a little sweat-box under the roof, for which she pays a dollar and a
+quarter per week.
+
+Not far away, up two flights, we find a Portuguese widow, with four
+little girls, the eldest fifteen, the next thirteen, and the younger
+ones three and six, respectively; they are all dwarfed by hardship and
+insufficient food, so that the one who is fifteen is not larger than an
+average girl of twelve. The mother is sick, and the girls are trying to
+keep the wolf from the door by carrying on the sewing. They are all
+hard at work; they carry the pants back and forth themselves, and so
+for the most of their work receive twelve cents, though for some they
+get only ten cents a pair. They have only two little rooms with the
+most meagre furniture; the rent is one dollar and a half per week, and
+the sick mother and four girls huddle together in the one bed at night.
+They are pretty, bright-faced, intelligent girls, and with a fair
+chance would grow into strong, noble women; but one shudders when he
+takes into consideration the fearful odds against which they will have
+to struggle in this poverty-stricken, crime-cursed alley.
+
+[Illustration: PORTUGUESE WIDOW AND CHILDREN.]
+
+[Illustration: LITTLE CHILDREN FINISHING PANTS.]
+
+Here is another case of a similar description only a few blocks away.
+We go up three narrow flights, steep and dark, for space is as
+important in a low-class Boston tenement house as in a sardine box. The
+stairway is slippery from filth on the last flight, for on a small
+bench at the top, in a dry-goods box, a little boy is raising squabs
+for the market, and the pigeon business, however much it may help to
+pay the rent, is not conducive to cleanliness. We find here a suite of
+three little rooms, the largest of which is not more than 10x10; the
+others are much smaller. In these three little pigeon boxes eight
+people live, at least sleep--five men and boys, and a mother and two
+girls. The men are off most of the day, and work at such jobs as they
+find; the mother and little girls make pants for another leading Boston
+clothing house. The two little girls, the younger only three years, are
+both overcasting seams. The three make on an average sixteen pairs of
+pants a week, for which they get thirteen cents a pair; the young
+pigeon fancier, already spoken of, carrying the goods to and fro. The
+rent of these crowded quarters is two dollars and a quarter per week.
+In the same building, down-stairs, we went into a room which could not
+have been more than 10x12, where an American woman, with seven young
+women helping her, was at work dressmaking. We could not discover
+whether they were working for the stores or not, but the air was
+poisonous, and the workers had that deadly pallor which comes from
+habitually breathing bad air and from lack of sufficient food.
+
+[Illustration: INVALID IN CHAIR.]
+
+Sickness, to be dreaded anywhere, is especially pitiful among these
+sweaters' slaves in the city. In the country the fresh air, fragrant
+with the breath of new-mown hay, or sweetened from ten thousand clover
+blossoms, is free to the poorest, but to be sick in a tenement house is
+something terrible. Yet crowded quarters, poisonous air, and filthy
+clothing make sickness a common guest in such places. I climbed one day
+up two flights into a dirty little room, the smell of which was
+sickening to me in three minutes, and yet there I found a man on a
+little cot (that had been given by the charitable missionary who guided
+me) who has been lying there for more than three years. For two years
+and more he had not even a cot, but lay on the floor in his dirt and
+pain. There are two children, too young to be of much assistance; the
+wife and mother sews, finishing pants for a rich Washington Street
+firm. She gets twelve, and sometimes, on fine, custom-made pants,
+thirteen cents a pair. She has worked so hard and continuously on poor
+food and with insufficient clothing, that rheumatism has settled in the
+joints of her fingers and stiffened them, till she is only able to turn
+off nine or ten pairs a week. Last week she could only make a dollar
+and fifteen cents; the rent was a dollar and a quarter. They have
+absolutely none of the ordinary comforts of life; the sick man has no
+sheets for his cot, and the rheumatic mother sleeps with her children
+on the floor.
+
+Down-stairs, we look in on a mother and two grown daughters who are
+finishing pants for another fashionable firm, one which does a large
+business with clergymen. They are paid thirteen cents a pair,
+ordinarily, and for the very finest custom-made pants they receive as
+high as twenty cents, but complain, as it takes so much longer with the
+fine pants, that from two to three pairs is as much as one woman can
+complete in a day. There is a helpless air about this mother and her
+daughters that is very depressing.
+
+[Illustration: POSTAL UNIFORMS.]
+
+There has been quite a controversy recently as to where the new United
+States postal uniforms for the Boston carriers were made. I settled
+this question to my own satisfaction during the past week, when, in
+company with Dr. Luther T. Townsend, of Boston University, and two
+other gentlemen, one of them being an Italian interpreter, I climbed
+the rickety stairs of an old North End tenement house, and found the
+pants for these same uniforms being made by Italian women at _nine and
+a half cents a pair_! They received them from a Jewish sweater. One of
+these women says that, by beginning at four o'clock in the morning and
+frequently working until twelve o'clock at night, she can make six
+pairs of these pants in a day. She has five children; the rent is two
+dollars per week. The husband has been out of work for eight months;
+the only one of the children who is able to earn anything is a boy who
+is a bootblack, and can earn, in fine weather, three dollars a week.
+Another woman at work on these postal uniforms, who was not able to
+labor quite such long hours, could only make four pairs a day. She also
+had five children, the only one able to earn anything being a daughter,
+fourteen years of age, who works in a sweater's shop for two dollars a
+week.
+
+On the walls of the rooms in this building where the postal uniforms
+were being made, the cockroaches were crawling, and in some places were
+swarming as thick as ants about an anthill.
+
+I have my note-books full of many other cases, including Portuguese,
+Italian, English, Polish, and a few Irish and American women, of the
+same general character as those already related; but a similar wicked
+scale of prices runs through the making of other clothing. I called on
+a woman in South Boston last week who was making overalls for a city
+firm at sixty cents a dozen pairs. They are the large variety of
+overalls, such as expressmen and such workers use, with straps going
+over the shoulders. I took a tape-line and carefully measured the
+sewing on one pair of these overalls. When they come to the seamstress,
+there has not been a stitch taken in them--they are simply cut out.
+There are thirty separate and distinct seams to be sewed, making in the
+aggregate thirty-two and a half feet of sewing, for which she receives
+the gross amount of five cents, out of which she has to pay the
+carrying to and fro. If she goes after them herself, she can bring only
+two dozen at a time, which will cost her ten cents car-fare, going and
+coming. When sent by express in a package of five or six dozen--the
+number she is able to make in a week--she is charged fifteen cents
+expressage each way, so that the expressage eats up the making of six
+pairs. In addition to this, the stiff cloth is very hard on machine
+needles, and she will break about ten cents worth per week. This
+woman's story is a sad one. Her husband, who was a strong, hard-working
+man, fell ill through an over-strain, and died after fifteen months'
+sickness, two months ago. She has three little children, the oldest
+four years and the youngest a little over a year. Work as hard as she
+can, driving her machine until late into the night, she is able to make
+only five dozen pairs of overalls a week, which, when expressage and
+breakage of needles are taken out, leaves her two dollars and
+sixty-five cents. The rent is a dollar and a half, which leaves one
+dollar and fifteen cents for the food and clothing of a mother and
+three children. Of course she cannot live on that, and would starve to
+death if she were not assisted by charity. And yet there is a firm
+doing business in South Boston mean enough to take advantage of the
+fact that people living in this part of the city are compelled to pay
+car-fare or expressage on work secured in the city proper, and so has
+reduced the price for work given out in South Boston to _fifty cents a
+dozen pairs_.
+
+I talked with another young woman, who has made overalls for both these
+firms, and has been compelled to give it up through sickness brought on
+from the confinement and strained position of sitting so many hours a
+day over a sewing-machine. This poor girl told me that both of these
+firms were now giving a great part of this class of work to the public
+authorities in charge of the House of Correction, to be done by the
+prisoners, and that a daily stint for a woman in prison is only eight
+pairs. This sick, discouraged girl, in a most heart-breaking way, said
+she thought she would better commit some crime in order to procure a
+place in the House of Correction, for there she would have much better
+quarters, a great deal nicer food, and would only have to make eight
+pairs a day, while at home she must force herself to make at least a
+dozen pairs a day, or starve.
+
+Fellow-citizens, what do you think of this? Is there not something
+wrong in a system of things that permits the authorities of the State
+or city to enter into competition with the sewing-women of Boston at
+such a cruel and heartless rate that no woman can work at it and keep
+out of prison, unless she is assisted by charity? This same South
+Boston firm gives out men's shirts to be made at sixty cents a dozen.
+The material for one of these shirts costs twenty-three cents, the
+making five cents--a total of twenty-eight cents. They retail these
+shirts at fifty cents apiece, making a net profit of twenty-two cents
+on an investment of twenty-eight cents for a few weeks' time.
+
+During the last few weeks, as I have gone about among these women, my
+ears have been haunted with that old song of Thomas Hood, as
+appropriate now, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the
+city of Boston, as it ever has been anywhere, at any time, in the
+history of human greed.
+
+  With fingers weary and worn,
+  With eyelids heavy and red,
+  A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
+  Plying her needle and thread--
+  Stitch! stitch! stitch!
+  In poverty, hunger, and dirt;
+  And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
+  She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"
+
+  "Work! work! work!
+  While the cock is crowing aloof!
+  And work--work--work,
+  Till the stars shine through the roof!
+  It's, oh! to be a slave
+  Along with the barbarous Turk,
+  Where woman has never a soul to save,
+  If this is Christian work!
+
+  "Work--work--work
+  Till the brain begins to swim!
+  Work--work--work
+  Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+  Stitch--stitch--stitch,
+  In poverty, hunger, and dirt,--
+  Sewing at once, with a double thread,
+  A shroud as well as a shirt!
+
+  "But why do I talk of death,
+  That phantom of grisly bone?
+  I hardly fear his terrible shape,
+  It seems so like my own--
+  It seems so like my own
+  Because of the fast I keep:
+  O God! that bread should be so dear,
+  And flesh and blood so cheap!
+
+  "Work--work--work!
+  My labor never flags;
+  And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
+  A crust of bread--and rags,
+  That shattered roof--and this naked floor--
+  A table--a broken chair--
+  And a wall so blank my shadow I thank
+  For sometimes falling there!
+
+
+ "Work--work--work
+  From weary chime to chime!
+  Work--work--work
+  As prisoners work for crime!"
+
+If Thomas Hood had lived in our day, and could have gone around with me
+in Boston, he would have had to make it stronger yet, for among us the
+good, honest sewing-woman must work at least one-third harder than the
+"prisoners work for crime." And on such wages the prayer with which he
+continues must be forever unanswered:--
+
+  "Oh! but to breathe the breath
+  Of the cowslip and primrose sweet--
+  With, the sky above my head,
+  And the grass beneath my feet!
+  For only one short hour
+  To feel as I used to feel,
+  Before I knew the woes of want,
+  And the walk that costs a meal!
+
+  "Oh! but for one short hour,--
+  A respite, however brief!
+  No blessed leisure for love or hope,
+  But only time for grief!
+  A little weeping would ease my heart;
+  But in their briny bed
+  My tears must stop, for every drop
+  Hinders needle and thread!"
+
+  With fingers weary and worn,
+  With eyelids heavy and red,
+  A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
+  Plying her needle and thread--
+  Stitch! stitch! stitch!
+  In poverty, hunger, and dirt;
+  And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,--
+  Would that its voice could reach the rich!--
+  She sang this "Song of the Shirt."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+LETTER OF CRITICISM.
+
+
+  "Slavery ain't o' nary color,
+    'Tain't the hide that makes it wus,
+  All it keers fer in a feller
+    'S jest to make him fill its pus."
+
+--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: Biglow Papers.
+
+
+BOSTON, June 29, 1891.
+
+REV. Louis ALBERT BANKS, _St. John's M. E. Church, South Boston, Mass._
+
+Dear Sir:--In the sermon which you preached yesterday, the title, as
+given in the newspapers, is "_The White Slaves of Boston Sweaters_."
+Under the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States
+there can be no such thing as "_slave_" in this country. Under the
+decision of Judge Parsons there has not been a slave in Massachusetts
+since the adoption of the Constitution. I therefore venture to ask you
+some questions.
+
+1. How do you justify the term "_white slave_" when applied to the
+persons whose condition you describe?
+
+2. "Climb three flights to an attic suite of two rooms, and there one
+would find a mother and five children" doubtless in very bad condition;
+the mother trying to support them; the tenement doubtless very bad.
+Suppose we condemn the tenement,--pull it down,--then these people
+would have _no_ roof over their heads. Is _no_ roof better than _some
+kind_ of a roof? Suppose we refuse to trust her to make pants? Is _no_
+work better than _some_ work?
+
+3. The mother earns her living, or part of it, by making "pants." Pants
+made in this way are sold at a very low price at retail, after being
+subjected to the cost of distribution in the customary way. There is
+great competition in this business. That competition leads every
+employer to pay the highest wages that can be recovered from the sale
+of the pants, also allowing the sweater's charge. If the cost of making
+is advanced on this class of pants, they cannot be sold at all; then
+there would be no sweater, and the woman would get no work. Is _no_
+work better than _some_ work?
+
+4. The sweater deals as a middleman with the manufacturer and the
+worker. If he did not deal with this kind of work, it would cost the
+manufacturer more to reach the worker than it does now; no sweater
+would be employed if he did not earn what he makes; then the
+manufacturer, or clothier, could pay _less_ for making the pants,
+because he now pays _all that the trade will bear_. If it cost him more
+to reach the worker, he _must_ pay less. Suppose we abolish the
+sweater, or middleman, then he would not distribute the work, and there
+would be _no_ work. Is that better than _some_ work?
+
+5. Suppose this woman had not come here with her children and had
+stayed, perhaps, in Italy or in Russia, instead of coming here. Is
+_some_ work _here_ better than _no_ work in _Italy_?
+
+6. If the mother cannot support the children,--being now in this
+country without having been sent back,--she is entitled to go with her
+children to the almshouse, where suitable shelter, clean rooms, and
+good food would be provided. Is it better for her to _try to support
+her children_ under existing conditions _than to go to the almshouse_?
+
+7. There is an ample supply of money available for purposes of true
+charity. Does not true charity consist in refusing to give alms to
+those who can or may support themselves? Is it better to give alms to
+those people in their attic, or to give alms to them under the
+conditions of the almshouse? Which course would be most sure to
+pauperize them utterly?
+
+8. The use of the term "slave" implies a slave-owner and a
+slave-driver. In this series of (1) _the manufacturer_, (2) _the
+sweater or middleman_, and (3) _the working-woman with her children_,
+which is the slave-owner and which is the slave-driver? Under what
+authority does the slave-master force this woman to render her labor
+for all that it is worth?
+
+9. If her work is worth more than she gets, can she not get it?
+
+A little inquiry into the condition of the clothing trade, and some
+examination of the fact, might disclose to you that the poor
+sewing-woman is poor because she sews poorly, and that there is always
+a scarcity of skilful and intelligent sewing-women, at full wages.
+
+My final question is, how do you propose to help those who are
+incapable of helping themselves, without pauperizing them yet more than
+they are pauperized under their present conditions? What will you do
+when you have destroyed the house and done away with the sweater?
+
+Are you justified, as a Christian minister, in creating a prejudice and
+arousing malignant passion by the use of the term "_slave_?" Can you
+defend or justify this term, under the conditions that are reported, as
+they are stated in the printed report of your sermon?
+
+I venture to put these questions to you because I think that the
+dangerous class in this community is to be found among persons who,
+without intelligence, create animosity, and by their method of
+preaching tend to retard rather than to promote the progress of the
+poor and ignorant in this country.
+
+Very sincerely yours, *****
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+REPLY TO A CRITICISM ON "THE WHITE SLAVES OF BOSTON SWEATERS".
+
+
+  "Freedom's secret wilt thou know?--
+  Counsel not with flesh and blood;
+  Loiter not for cloak or food;
+  Eight thou feelest, rush to do."
+
+--RALPH WALDO EMERSON: _Freedom_.
+
+
+Among the scores of thankful letters which I have received, commenting
+on the discourse on "The White Slaves of the Boston Sweaters," there is
+one of an entirety different character, written by a distinguished
+writer on social questions, a gentleman for whom I have always
+entertained the highest respect. I should be very glad to give the name
+of the author of this letter; but as it is marked "personal," I cannot,
+in honor, do so.
+
+This letter so clearly and unswervingly outlines and defends the
+extreme conservative side of this question, that I feel I cannot do a
+better service to the cause of the "sweater's victim" than to answer it
+in this public way. My critic begins by assailing the title of the
+discourse. He says: "In the sermon which you preached yesterday, the
+title as given in the newspapers is 'The White Slaves of the Boston
+Sweaters.' Under the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the
+United States, there can be no such thing as 'slave' in this country.
+Under the decision of Judge Parsons there has not been a slave in
+Massachusetts since the adoption of the Constitution." Wonderful Judge
+Parsons! who is able, by the magic wand of his decision, to unshackle
+all the slaves who, under the cruel whip of necessity,--more unmerciful
+than any slave-driver's lash,--have sweated under the burdens imposed
+by avaricious task-masters in every city of the commonwealth.
+
+Can you make men free by constitution simply? Are there no slaves
+except those who, like the African thirty years ago, are bought and
+sold at the auction block? Ay, indeed! for every black man liberated by
+President Lincoln's proclamation, there is, to-day, a white man robbed
+and degraded and brutalized by some gigantic trust or other equally
+soulless, unfeeling, corporate power.
+
+For every mother whose heart was broken by having her children wrenched
+from her arms in the African slave-market, there is a white mother,
+whose very soul is crushed at the sight of her hungry, ragged, little
+ones. For every black babe torn from its mother's breast by the
+iniquitous system of negro slavery, the slums of our great cities have
+a white child, whose future is equally dark and hopeless.
+
+My critic's first question is, "How do you justify the term 'white
+slave' when applied to the persons whose condition you describe?" My
+answer is very simple. If a widow with little children to care for, who
+cannot go out to do other kinds of work, and is compelled to work
+eighteen hours a day for fifty cents, and dares not give this up for
+fear of starvation to her children, is not a slave, then will somebody
+tell me what element is lacking to make slavery?
+
+[Illustration: A TENEMENT-HOUSE COURT.]
+
+The second question is as follows: "'Climb three flights to an attic
+suite of two rooms, and there one would find a mother and five
+children,' doubtless in very bad condition; the mother trying to
+support them; the tenement doubtless very bad. Suppose we condemn the
+tenement,--pull it down,--then these people will have no roof over
+their heads. Is _no_ roof better than _some_ kind of a roof? Suppose we
+refuse to trust her to make pants--is _no_ work better than _some_
+work?"
+
+To the first part of this question, relating to the roof of this bad
+tenement house, I answer frankly: Yes, no roof is better. This poor
+woman, working at starvation-wages, is furnishing from twelve to twenty
+per cent interest on the money invested in this miserable old rookery,
+whose heartless landlord, like the unjust judge of the Gospels, fears
+not God and regards not man. If we condemn this disease-breeding
+death-trap, it will not be a question of this woman having "no roof"
+over her head, but she may have a decent roof, with healthful, sanitary
+regulations, at a less rent than she now pays, and still pay an honest
+interest on the investment to the landlord. As to the second part of
+the question, "Is no work better than some work?" that is not a fair
+putting of the question. Our modern Christian civilization does not
+dare to put it that way. It is not a question of no work, or some work.
+We must furnish this woman some work, at such, just and rightful wages
+as shall give her and her children bread to eat and raiment to put on,
+and a decent, though it be humble, roof over their heads.
+
+We pass to our critic's third question: "The mother earns her living,
+or a part of it, by making 'pants.' Pants made in this way are sold at
+a very low price at retail, after being subjected to the cost of
+distribution in the customary way. There is great competition in this
+business. That competition leads every employer to pay the highest
+wages that can be recovered from the sale of the pants, also allowing
+the sweater's charge. If the cost of making is advanced on this class
+of pants, they cannot be sold at all; then there would be no sweater,
+and the woman would get no work. Is _no_ work better than _some_ work?"
+The trouble with a great deal of this is, that it is incorrect both in
+its premise and in its reasoning. It is indeed true that there is great
+competition in the clothing business, but it is not true that the
+result of this competition leads every employer to pay the highest
+wages that can be recovered from the sale of the pants. It is also a
+remarkable statement to make, that if the cost is advanced, then there
+will be no more pants made. Can my critic really believe that the whole
+of mankind would suddenly go "pantless" if the price for making them
+were raised to a point where the sewing-woman could make a decent
+living? It is also a curious statement to make that "If there were no
+sweater, the woman would get no work." The sweater is a comparatively
+recent institution, and I devoutly believe an institution of the devil.
+Before the sweater came to be a factor in the situation, the woman had
+work, and better pay than she now receives. The incoming of the sweater
+has not resulted in more work, but in less wages.
+
+If my critic will take the trouble to examine the testimony given
+before the committee appointed by the English House of Lords, which may
+be found in the Public Library, he will see that it is the universal
+testimony of hundreds of witnesses that the sweater is an unnecessary
+factor in the manufacturing trades, and that in every department of the
+labor world where the sweating system has been introduced, the wages of
+the laborer have been reduced from forty to seventy per cent.
+
+The fourth question is similar to the third: "The sweater deals as a
+middleman with the manufacturer and the worker. If he did not deal with
+this kind of work, it would cost the manufacturer more to reach the
+worker than it does now. No sweater would be employed if he did not
+earn what he makes. Then the manufacturer, or clothier, could pay less
+for making the pants, because he now pays all the trade will bear. If
+it cost him more to reach the worker, he must pay less. Suppose we
+abolish the sweater, or middleman, then he would not distribute the
+work, and there would be _no_ work. Is that better than _some_ work?"
+
+I have already answered this question in part. It is not correct that
+it would cost the manufacturer more to reach the worker without the
+sweater than with him. It is also ridiculous to suppose that if the
+sweater were abolished there would be no work. The demand for clothing
+would be just the same without the sweater as with him. Besides that,
+everything that takes the employer away from the people who do his
+work, and removes him from contact with them, is a bad thing, and
+always bodes ill to any harmonious relation between capital and labor.
+I am satisfied that there are proprietors in Boston firms, who, if they
+could go around with me, and see, as I have seen, the poverty and
+suffering of the sweaters' slaves who are making up their goods, would
+revolt against the whole system. It is only the sweater who comes in
+contact with these people, and the sweater is, as a rule, greedy and
+avaricious, and hardened against all humane feeling.
+
+[Illustration: SUNDAY ON NORTH STREET.]
+
+
+ We pass to the fifth question: "Suppose this woman had not come here
+with her children, and had stayed, perhaps, in Italy or in Russia,
+instead of coming here. Is _some_ work _here_ better than _no_ work in
+_Italy_?" Very likely it is true that the woman is as well off here as
+she would be in Italy. But is _Italy_ to be the standard of our
+American civilization? I stood on a bridge over the Tiber, fronting the
+famous castle of St. Angelo in Rome, on a hot Sunday morning in July,
+and watched a company of people on a barge who were driving piles in
+the river. There were about eighty men and women, the sexes about
+equally divided, pulling and tugging away, in the hot sun, at ropes and
+pulleys, in order to lift the heavy iron hammer and drop it on the head
+of the piling. In Boston there would have been a little donkey engine,
+and one or two men to look after it all the crew that would have been
+needed. Shall we go back to Italy for a model? Furthermore, this
+Italian woman is setting up a standard of life for all laboring women.
+It is not enough to say she is as well off here as in Italy. We cannot
+afford to permit the establishing of little Italian centres throughout
+the Republic, with which every American laborer in the land must enter
+into competition. No matter where people came from, nor what they have
+suffered in their native land, if we permit them to come to us, we are
+compelled, in sheer self-defence, to see that they are treated fairly
+and justly, and receive a sufficient compensation for their toil to
+support them in cleanliness, intelligence, and morality.
+
+Question six raises a different problem: "If the mother cannot support
+the children,--being now in this country, without having been sent
+back,--she is entitled to go with her children to the almshouse, where
+suitable shelter, clean rooms, and good food will be provided. Is it
+better for her to _try to support her children_, under existing
+conditions, than to go to the almshouse?" It is, of course, better for
+the woman to try to support her children. The almshouse is for the sick
+and helplessly infirm; Such may go there in all honor, without
+disgrace. I doubt not there are men in the almshouse who have done more
+service to humanity than many others who die amid luxury and wealth.
+But nothing can be more vicious than to speak of people who are able
+and willing to work as candidates for the almshouse, because the cruel
+oppression in their wages makes it impossible for them to support
+themselves. It is not charity these people need or want; it is justice.
+True, Christ said, "The poor ye have always with you," and it is
+probable that we shall always need to support by charity the crippled,
+the insane, and the unfortunate, but it is a certain indication of
+rottenness in any civilization that makes charity necessary for a man
+or woman who is able and willing to work.
+
+The seventh question continues this same thought with variations:
+"There is an ample supply of money available for purposes of true
+charity. Does not true charity consist in refusing to give alms to
+those who can, or may, support themselves? Is it better to give alms to
+these people, in their attic, or to give alms to them under the
+conditions of the almshouse? What course would be most sure to
+pauperize them utterly?" For once, my critic and myself are in
+agreement. I believe it is better for one to partly support himself
+than not to do anything towards it. Nothing is more demoralizing to any
+one than to become accustomed to receive charity. But, after all, you
+may pauperize people almost as rapidly in the attic as in the
+almshouse. It is against the whole system that I make war. I do not
+admit, for a moment, that it is necessary for the sewing-woman to
+receive such wages as to compel her starvation, unless alms be given to
+her in her attic.
+
+In the discourse which is thus criticised. I showed plainly that the
+aprons for which the seamstress received, net, one cent for making,
+returned a profit of fifteen cents, on an investment of ten cents by
+her employer. Now, I do not admit that the rigors of competition are so
+great that it compels this manufacturer to make one hundred and fifty
+per cent profit while this woman toils sixteen hours a day to make
+forty-five cents.
+
+I showed that the women who make shirts made only fifty cents a day,
+and yet the proprietor made on every shirt twenty-two cents profit on
+an investment of twenty-eight cents. I do not admit that competition is
+so stern that it is necessary for this shirt manufacturer to make
+seventy-eight per cent profit while the woman who works for him must
+beg assistance of the Provident Association, or see her children cry
+for bread.
+
+Or, take the case of the poor girl, whose mother finishes pants for the
+postal uniforms at nine and one-half cents a pair, slaving eighteen
+hours for fifty-seven cents; and she, the daughter, toils all day long,
+in the midst of the physical and moral stench of a Jewish sweater's
+shop, for sixteen and two-thirds cents. But she is better off than the
+orphan girl that works beside her, whose condition some poet has
+described:--
+
+  "Left there, nobody's daughter,
+   Child of disgrace and shame,
+  Nobody ever taught her
+   A mother's sweet saving name.
+
+
+  Nobody ever caring
+   Whether she stood or fell,
+  And men (are they men?) ensnaring
+   With the arts and the gold of hell!
+
+  Stitching with ceaseless labor
+   To earn her pitiful bread;
+  Begging a crust of a neighbor,
+   And getting a curse instead!
+
+  All through the long, hot summer,
+   All through the cold, dark time,
+  With fingers that numb and number
+   Grow, white as the frost's white rime.
+
+  Nobody ever conceiving
+   The throb of that warm, young life,
+  Nobody ever believing
+   The strain of that terrible strife!
+
+  Nobody kind words pouring
+   In that orphan heart's sad ear;
+  But all of us all ignoring,
+   What lies at our door so near!"
+
+There is nothing wholesome in the question whether it is better to
+pauperize people a little in the attic, or to pauperize them altogether
+in the almshouse. We ought not to pauperize them at all. A noble
+Christian woman, who has a young men's Bible class in the North End,
+and who by her womanly tact and Christian sympathy has gained the
+confidence of some of the most hopeless cases in that section, told me
+that one of these boys said to her, "When the Back Bay folks know that
+we are made of flesh and blood, they won't pauperize us any longer."
+
+[Illustration: CLARK'S MISSION.]
+
+The eighth question returns in some of its aspects to the first: "The
+use of the term 'slave' implies a slave-owner and a slave-driver. In
+this series of the manufacturer, the sweater or middleman, and the
+working-woman with her children, which is the slave-owner, and which is
+the slave-driver? Under what authority does the slave-master force this
+woman to render her labor for all that it is worth?" Answering the last
+part of the question first, I have already shown that the woman does
+not get all that her work is worth. The manufacturer, who makes from
+seventy-eight to a hundred and fifty per cent profit, gets a far larger
+proportion of the profits than rightly belongs to him.
+
+Under the sweating system, the sweater is, most emphatically, both the
+slave-master and slave-driver; and no Georgia overseer was ever more
+cruel than some of these sweater taskmasters in Boston to-day.
+
+Even at the wretched wages they pay, they will not give any of their
+workers all the work they can do; they dole out the work to them,
+trying to make them think it is very scarce. If they ask for higher
+pay, they are met at once with a threat of discharge. Do you ask why
+they do not hunt for something better? What can a poor,
+half-broken-down mother, with three little babies, do hunting work? Who
+will pay the rent, furnish them food, and care for the children while
+she makes her search? There are thousands of laboring people, both men
+and women, in all our great cities, who are in the same condition that
+a majority of the Israelites were when Moses came to them, and told the
+marvellous story of his talk with Jehovah, and painted before their dim
+eyes the picture of the Canaan, and recounted to their dull ears the
+promise of their deliverance from bondage. Pathetic, indeed, is the
+record, "They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit and for
+cruel bondage." It is idle to talk, as so many newspapers as well as
+private individuals do, as though domestic service were the cure-all
+for these half-starving, under-paid women. A great majority of the
+women who are slaves to these sweaters, have families of little
+children depending on them, that are as dear to their hearts as are the
+children of more fortunate mothers to them. Dr. Barnardo, of London,
+who has had a most extensive experience among the poor, tells of a poor
+woman, with a husband lying disabled in the hospital, earning her
+living by charing and odd jobs, while she herself was receiving
+out-door hospital relief for physical debility. Driven at last to
+accept assistance from the relieving officer, she hastened home, placed
+the bread and meat on a table, and fell dead of exhaustion. Dr.
+Barnardo was sent for, and beside the dead body of the mother he was
+surprised, as well he might be, to find five well-fed, chubby children.
+The poor, slum mother had literally starved herself to death that her
+children might live! Truly, as Coleridge says, "A mother is the holiest
+thing alive;" and God never intended that the almshouse or the orphan
+asylum should be the only refuge held open for a mother who is able and
+willing to work to support her children.
+
+In the ninth question our critic says: "If her work is worth more than
+she gets, can she not get it? A little inquiry into the condition of
+the clothing trade and some examination of the facts might disclose to
+you that the poor sewing-woman is poor because she sews poorly, and
+that there is always a scarcity of skilful and intelligent
+sewing-women, at full wages." The more thorough my examination into the
+facts of the case, the more I am convinced that the sweating system is
+demoralizing the entire clothing trade, as it will every trade it
+touches. Whether the woman sews poorly or not, she does not, in any
+class she may be placed, receive the wages to which she is entitled.
+
+[Illustration: NORTH END JUNK SHOP.]
+
+The conclusion of my critic's letter is, I think, as remarkable as
+anything in it. He says: "My final question is, how do you propose to
+help those who are incapable of helping themselves, without pauperizing
+them yet more than they are pauperized under their present conditions?
+What will you do when you have destroyed the house and done away with
+the sweater?" To this part of the concluding question I simply say, I
+will be a Christian, and pay honest wages for honest work. But the
+critic continues: "Are you justified, as a Christian minister, in
+creating prejudice and arousing malignant passion by the use of the
+term 'slave?' Can you defend or justify this term under the conditions
+as they are stated in the printed report of your sermon? I venture to
+put these questions to you because I think that the dangerous class in
+this community is to be found among persons who, without intelligence,
+create animosity and, by their method of preaching, tend to retard
+rather than to promote the progress of the poor and ignorant in this
+country." My answer to all that is, that, as a Christian minister, I am
+a follower of Him, who, standing in the midst of the self-satisfied and
+wealthy oppressors of His times, exclaimed, "Woe unto you, Pharisees!
+for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over
+judgment and the love of God." And who, standing in the audience of all
+the people, said unto His disciples, "Beware of the Scribes which
+devour widows' houses, and for a show make long prayers: the same shall
+receive greater damnation;" who, standing in the presence of the
+lawyers, cried aloud, "Woe unto you, also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men
+with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the
+burdens with one of your fingers." I am a follower of Him who came "not
+to send peace on the earth, but a sword." All an infernal system of
+oppression, like the sweating system, asks, is to be let alone. To
+uncover its atrocities is like turning over a huge stone in the meadow
+in springtime, that has been a hiding-place for bugs and worms that
+nest away in the dark. As soon as the hot, searching sunlight finds
+them, they will wriggle and squirm in agony until they can crawl under
+cover again. So I do not wonder that, when the hideous cruelty of the
+tenement-house sweat-shop is brought to light, the sweater and all his
+friends wriggle and squirm in an agony of fright and shame. Neither am
+I alarmed that this critic, as a type of conservatism, regards me as a
+member of the most dangerous class in the community. It was ever thus.
+The old antislavery agitators were considered the most dangerous men in
+the republic, and I remember that a very distinguished minister once
+bitterly regretted the agitation on the evils of slavery, because he
+feared it would destroy the prospect for a revival of religion in the
+city where he lived.
+
+[Illustration: HOME OF THE MATHERS.]
+
+If to be a Christian minister is to stand as a policeman to hold back
+the righteous indignation of the robbed and degraded laborer, or preach
+patience and contentment to empty stomachs,--empty that the sweater may
+grow rich and fat on the toil of orphans and widows,--then I spurn the
+title as beneath the dignity of my manhood; but if, as I take it, to be
+a Christian minister is to be like my Master, the brother of all men,
+rich or poor, standing forever as the unflinching enemy of oppression
+and injustice wherever found, as the friend and advocate of the
+defenceless and the weak, then I am proud of the title, and thank God
+for its unspeakable privilege.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE PLAGUE OF THE SWEAT-SHOP.
+
+
+"Can the heart be deformed, and contract incurable ugliness and
+infirmity under the pressure of disproportionate misfortune, like the
+spine beneath too low a vault?"
+
+--VICTOR HUGO: _Les Miserables_.
+
+
+The Klamath Lake Indians in Oregon have a strange and weird fashion of
+mourning their dead. They dig a hole in the ground, and roof it over
+with willows, which they cover with dirt, forming a sort of underground
+cabin. In case of death in the family, the relatives go into this
+dug-out, which is called a "sweat-lodge," and heated rocks are brought
+in and heaped in the centre of the lodge, and water sprinkled over
+them, so as to fill the room with steam. In the midst of this
+steam-heated, poisonous air the family hover around their heap of
+rocks, and sweat for days at a time, in memory of their departed
+friends.
+
+When the mourning days are over, they heap up into a cairn beside the
+sweat-lodge the stones that have been used, as a monument to their
+dead.
+
+But that, after all, is only a brief torture which is soon over, and is
+constantly lightened by the hope of relief. The sweat-lodge of our
+modern civilization is a much more serious matter. The tortured victims
+who are suffering there, are not mourning for their dead friends, but
+for the living, and in the dark night of their sorrow there is no
+promise of a brighter dawn.
+
+The word "sweater" derives its origin from the Anglo-Saxon word _swat_,
+and means the separation or extraction of labor or toil from others,
+for one's own benefit. Any person who employs others to extract from
+them surplus labor without compensation, is a sweater. A
+middleman-sweater is a person who acts as a contractor of such labor
+for another man. The position becomes aggravated when the
+middleman-sweater, as is usually the case in the modern sweat-shop,
+employs the labor himself, at his own house, for the purpose of
+extracting a double quantity of labor, either by lowering wages or
+working longer hours.
+
+An English writer gives this definition of the sweating system: "One
+whereby the middleman tries to get the largest profit, with the least
+labor and outlay, out of the maximum labor of his workers." Another
+gives three definitions: "First, one who grinds the face of the poor;
+second, a man who contributes neither capital, skill, nor speculation,
+and yet gets a profit; third, a middleman." Still another describes it
+as a systematized payment of unfair wages. Away back in the days of
+Queen Anne the term "sweater" was given to a certain class of street
+ruffian. The sweaters went about in small bands, and, forming a circle
+around an inoffensive wayfarer, pricked him with their swords, and
+compelled him to dance till he perspired from the exertion. The sweater
+is still a ruffian, though the street is no longer the scene of action,
+but, in some attic or tenement-house bedroom, he gathers his victims
+from the poorest and most helpless of our population.
+
+It is my purpose, first of all this morning, to show you something of
+the growth and development of the sweat-shop in England. It is
+reasonable for us to suppose that, if left to itself, it will produce
+the same general results in this country that it has there. Fortunately
+we have an abundance of data upon which to form our conclusions.
+
+There are in the Boston Public Library five ponderous volumes
+containing the evidence taken before a commission, appointed by the
+English House of Lords, to examine into the sweating system of Great
+Britain.
+
+I think it is well for American laboring-men to know that this evidence
+puts beyond question the fact that the sweating business, while it may
+begin with the clothing trade, by no means ends there. "The plague of
+the sweatshop" is not something of interest to the tailors and
+sewing-women only, but is of equal importance to workers of every
+class. Take the matchbox trade; before the sweating days, the people
+who worked at it received two and three-fourths pence a gross. Now the
+large contractors let and sub-let until it is only one and a half pence
+a gross, and a woman and a family of children have to work all the week
+to make four or five shillings.
+
+The fur trade in Europe has been largely driven into Whitechapel
+sweaters' shops. They call the sweater in this business a "chamber
+master," and in these foul chambers, in the midst of "bad smells, great
+heat, no ventilation, and fetid refuse," men and women swelter and die,
+the men getting ten shillings, and the women about five shillings a
+week.
+
+[Illustration: THE PEANUTTER.]
+
+The cabinet and upholstery trade is not exempt. Sub-contracting here,
+as in clothing, is the first step in sweating. The evidence shows that
+sweating began in this business as early as 1855, but has rapidly
+increased under pauper immigration from Italy and Russia since 1880.
+Much of the work is crowded into garrets and cellars, where there are
+no sanitary arrangements. So universally is this so, that the sweater
+in this business is called a "garret master." Wages have been brought
+down, from forty to fifty shillings a week, to from eighteen to twenty
+shillings.
+
+The boot and shoe trade has had the same history. Large numbers of
+foreigners are employed in this work. The workers are kept in ignorance
+of the language and under surveillance, so as to be taken advantage of.
+They are not instructed in the more skilled work, and, to use the words
+of one of the witnesses, "are too crushed to resist." They are
+compelled to work from eighteen to twenty hours a day. Wages in these
+sweat-shops are from ten to fifteen shillings a week.
+
+In Sheffield, the great cutlery manufacturing city, the same system is
+prevailing, and a woman whose business was awl-blade grinding, a strong
+woman of forty-five years of age, testified that she could only make
+six and a half shillings per week.
+
+Military harness and accoutrements are also made by the sweaters. Many
+workmen earn only three pence an hour, and complain that they cannot
+live on it. The nail trade is in the same condition. A man and wife
+working together make thirteen shillings a week. Women's earnings
+average from three shillings and a half to six shillings per week.
+
+Large numbers of women are only able to earn three shillings a week at
+this business. Boys and girls are paid, in a sweater's chain-shop,
+one-half penny per hour.
+
+A witness from Glasgow testified in regard to the clothing shops of
+that city: "It is a rule among the sweaters to give the men some money,
+a shilling, every night, to keep them alive till the next day. Some of
+the men at the end of the week are actually in debt instead of having
+anything coming to them. When in debt, they do not, as a rule, come
+back, but go to another sweater. The men never actually get any wages,
+but are in debt from one year's end till another. All independence is
+taken out of the men; they are always in the sweater's power."
+
+A witness from Leeds says: "Wages are driven to a starvation level, and
+workmen at piece-work compelled to excessive hours. If the employers
+find a good workman, who is earning good wages by piece-work, they try
+to reduce prices. Time work is healthier, but no one would believe how
+the men are driven in shops where time-work exists."
+
+Another gentleman, testifying about his investigations in Glasgow,
+tells of a place he visited, where a sweater had between forty and
+fifty women employed in an old boiler shed, a disused part of an
+engineer's shop; the women had to get to it by three wooden ladders,
+and had to go through a joiner's shop in order to enter the workroom.
+There was no sanitary accommodation for these women anywhere. It is a
+common practice for sweaters to take on learners, that is to say, to
+employ young girls for a certain time to learn the machine part of the
+work; but they get no wages for say five or six weeks or so, or two
+months, and after that time, if competent, they receive two or three
+shillings per week. But the sweater's trick, as soon as the busy season
+is over, is to discharge all these girls and take on a new batch.
+
+The practical slavery to which the laboring-people, by the sweating
+system, have been degraded, is illustrated on almost every page of the
+evidence. One witness testifies: "They do almost as they like with
+their victims. The people are afraid to give evidence against them. The
+sweater is a law unto himself. One woman I came across says she has not
+been paid for her work done some three years ago, on some trivial
+pretext which the sweater made. Another deducted a whole week's work
+from a woman's wages because she was ten minutes late, and so
+aggravated the people in the neighborhood that they smashed his
+windows, showing the state of things between the sweater and his
+people."
+
+As one would naturally expect, moral degradation keeps pace with the
+outrage upon the rights of the laborer. It is claimed that the
+Jewesses, who have always had the most unblemished character of any
+women in the world, are being ruined in the sweat-shops of London,
+where they are herded together with all classes of men in a way which
+renders morality and decency next to impossible. One witness bears this
+terrible testimony: "The sweating system, in which you have young girls
+working with men of all nationalities, and of all degrees of
+intelligence, conduces to their being later on, and they are mostly, to
+my certain knowledge, prostitutes. Most of the young English girls whom
+we can see in the Strand and Oxford Street are, or have been,
+tailoresses, and the conditions conduce to that effect."
+
+So great and wide-spread is this question of the increase of immorality
+in England, under the reign of the sweat-shop, that a barrister-at-law,
+Mr. Wm. Thompson, has written a novel entitled, "The Sweater's Victim,"
+which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the "plague of the
+sweat-shop."
+
+It is easy to say, "Oh, well, these horrible things you are telling us
+about belong to the Old World!" I would to God they did belong to the
+Old World alone, but the horrible truth is, that this vicious system is
+like a banyan-tree that has run its roots under the sea, and is coming
+up, and blossoming, and flourishing in all our great American cities.
+Listen to this description of the slaves of the sweat-shop in New York,
+given by the _New York Herald_: "In the lower portion of the great east
+side of this city, are hundreds of tall, ill-appearing tenement houses,
+in which thousands of half-starved, sunken-eyed men and women are
+crowded into small, foul, over-heated rooms, working day and night for
+just enough to keep body and soul together. Scattered among the workers
+are dirty children, and sometimes cats and dogs. Everything in these
+places has to stand aside for work. It is work, work, work, day and
+night, year in and year out. In these over-crowded rooms the air is
+poisoned with the heat from the stoves, the steam from the cooking, and
+the fumes of oil and gas. Very few of the toilers can speak English.
+They are the most wretched-looking, miserably-paid class of workers in
+America. They are foreigners, and come chiefly from Russia and Poland.
+No sunshine enters into their lives. Their existence is one hard, deep,
+grinding toil. They have no hope of brighter days to come. As they have
+worked for years, so they expect to work in the future. But the sweater
+does not care. He has his contracts with the manufacturers. Every day
+great bundles of clothing are dumped into these dens, and then the
+slaves are driven at full speed to make them up. Competition is keen,
+but the sweater makes money."
+
+[Illustration: INSIDE A SWEAT-SHOP.]
+
+The Journeymen Tailors' National Union, in its fifth annual report,
+describes in detail one of these New York sweat-shops, similar to those
+which the recent commission, appointed by the Governor of
+Massachusetts, found to be the manufactories of enormous quantities of
+clothing for Boston firms: "On the first floor, which was occupied by
+two families, was a contractor, or 'sweater,' who made overcoats. In
+the front room, 8x16 ft., eight full-grown men were at work, some on
+sewing-machines, a man pressing, and others finishing. They were
+hollow-cheeked and cadaverous. Trousers and undershirts were their only
+apparel. In the rear room, 9x14, were six other men, almost identical
+in appearance with those in the front. All were working as if for dear
+life.
+
+"This place was simply indescribable in its filthiness. The only
+household furniture discernible (for the contractor and his family
+lived in the rooms), were a bedstead and a child's crib in one of the
+two dark, so-called bedrooms. Bedding and overcoats were piled up
+together. The floors were four inches deep with dirt and cotton
+battings and scraps of linings. The ceilings and woodwork looked as
+though they had not seen a brush since the house was built years ago.
+Water from the floor above had leaked through the ceiling, but it
+seemed to make no difference. One stove was used by the pressers and
+the cook. It did not appear that there was any regular meal hour. There
+was a table littered with dirty dishes, morsels of food, and scraps of
+coats. One man was seated, eating out of a dish with his fingers,
+without the aid of spoon, knife, or fork. As soon as he had finished,
+he merely wiped his hands on some cotton batting, and proceeded with
+his work. The poor creatures were haggard and apparently stupid." What
+wonder?
+
+Dr. George C. Stiebling, of New York, who accompanied the recent Boston
+investigating committee, says, in an affidavit made after a careful
+investigation, that the New York sweatshops "in which clothing is
+manufactured, and which serve at the same time as dwelling-rooms for
+the bosses, their families, and boarders, are overcrowded,
+ill-ventilated, over-heated, full of dirt, filth, vermin and stench,
+and that, consequently, they are in a most unwholesome,
+health-destroying and disease-breeding condition." The doctor, speaking
+of one particular case, says: "On the fourth floor I found four very
+small rooms, occupied by five sewing-machines, twenty-four working
+hands, and the family of the boss consisting of himself, wife, and five
+living children. The mother reported to affiant that, within the last
+few years, six of her children had died of various diseases here in the
+same place." Relying upon these and other facts, which he relates, the
+Doctor declares it to be his deliberate conclusion, as a medical man,
+that "the dust, filth, and dirt, accumulated in the 'sweating dens' he
+has visited and examined, contain the germs of the prevailing
+infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, scarlatina, measles,
+erysipelas, and smallpox, and that the clothing manufactured in these
+shops is impregnated with such germs, and consequently may transmit and
+spread the aforesaid diseases to persons who handle and wear it."
+
+These places referred to in this affidavit by Dr. Stiebling, who is a
+wealthy and respectable medical practitioner, are places where goods
+are made almost exclusively for Boston houses.
+
+Another physician of standing and repute, Dr. Markierez, who made an
+investigation of the sweating district, in connection with a commission
+from the advisory board of the operative tailors of Boston, in August,
+1889, states that the section of New York City in which the
+tenement-house system of clothing manufacture is carried on, is filthy
+and infested with vermin; and he further affirms that the sanitary
+condition of these tenement houses is so low that the death rate is
+frightful and almost beyond comprehension.
+
+That the sweating system in New York degrades the men and women
+employed in the sweatshops, may be inferred from the fact that men and
+women to the number of twelve have been found sleeping together in one
+of these workrooms. The tenement-house factories are so crowded that no
+such thing as privacy or modesty, on the part of men or women, is
+possible; the usual water-closet is a wooden bucket upon every landing,
+which fills the air with its vile and death-breeding stench.
+
+The New York sweaters, like some of their English prototypes, take
+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.
+
+"There have been many such instances in the last two weeks. Mrs.
+Henderson could not live on the salaries offered her. She could live if
+she accepted the 'propositions' of her employers. The hope of an easier
+life, the fear of death, and the natural clinging to life, turn many
+working-women into the paths of shame." Miss Woodbridge further adds
+that "in Paris it is an understood fact that women who are employed in
+shops cannot exist without assistance from other questionable sources,
+and," she continues, "unless something is done at once, this must also
+become the case in our land, where we pride ourselves on our respect
+for honest toil."
+
+Helen Campbell, in her "Prisoners of Poverty," opens a little window
+into the terrible temptation which comes to generous young souls under
+this pressure of unrequited toil. In her true story of Rose Haggerty,
+who was sewing her very life into the support of her orphan brothers
+and sisters, we have a practical illustration of the results of this
+injustice. "There came a Saturday night when she took her bundle of
+work,--shirts again, and now eighty-five cents a dozen (it is worse
+than that under some of our Boston sweaters); there were five dozen,
+and when the dollar and a half was laid away for rent, it was easy to
+see what was left for food, coal, and light. Clothing had ceased to be
+a part of the question. The children were barefoot. They had a bit of
+meat on Sunday; but for the rest, bread, potatoes, and tea were the
+diet, with cabbage and a bit of pork, now and then, for luxuries.
+
+"Nora (a little sick sister) had been failing, and to-night Rose
+planned to buy her 'something with a taste to it,' and looked at the
+sausages hanging in long links with a sudden reckless determination to
+get enough for all. She was faint with hunger, and staggered as she
+passed a basement restaurant, from which came savory smells, snuffed
+longingly by some half-starved children. Her turn was long in coming;
+and as she laid her bundle on the counter, she saw suddenly that her
+needle had 'jumped,' and that half an inch or so of band required
+re-sewing. As she looked, the foreman's knife slipped under the place,
+and in a moment half the band had been ripped. 'That's no good,' he
+said. 'You are getting botchier all the time.' 'Give it to me,' Rose
+pleaded. 'I'll do it over.' 'Take it if you like,' he said
+indifferently, 'but there is no pay for that kind o' work.' He had
+counted her money as he spoke, and Rose cried out as she saw the sum:
+'Do you mean you will cheat me of the whole dozen, because half an inch
+on one has gone wrong?' 'Call it what you like,' he said. 'R. & Co.
+ain't going to send out anything but first-class work. Stand out of the
+way and let the next have a chance. There's your three dollars and
+forty cents.'
+
+"Rose went out silently, choking down rash words that would have lost
+her work altogether; but as she left the dark stairs, and felt again
+the cutting wind from the river, she stood still, something more than
+despair on her face. The children could hardly fare worse without her
+than with her. The river could not be colder than this cold world that
+gave her no chance, and that had no place for anything but rascals.
+
+"She turned toward it as the thought came; but some one had her arm,
+and she cried out suddenly, and tried to wrench away. 'Easy now,' a
+voice said. 'You're breakin' your heart for trouble, an' here I am in
+the nick o' time. Come with me an' you'll have no more of it, for my
+pocket's full to-night, and that's more than it'll be in the mornin' if
+you do n' take me in tow.' It was a sailor from a merchantman just in,
+and Rose looked at him for a moment. Then she took his arm and walked
+toward Roosevelt Street. It might be dishonor, but it was certainly
+food and warmth for the children, and what did it matter? She had
+fought her fight for twenty years, and it had been a vain struggle."
+
+[Illustration: A BOSTON "BRIDGE OF SIGHS."]
+
+When she poured her heart-breaking story into Helen Campbell's ears,
+she said, "Let God Almighty judge who's to blame most--I that was
+driven, or them that drove me to the pass I'm in."
+
+Ah! but you say, even as you sigh over this fearful picture, "That is
+in wicked New York." Yes, but Boston has its tragedies equally as
+heartrending and shameful. During this past week a thoroughly
+respectable young married woman, whose evidence is indisputable, and
+who, prior to her marriage, had worked for several years as a
+saleswoman in the Boston stores, told me that at one time her employer
+told her that, on account of the dull season, he would have to
+discharge her, but that he would give her a good recommendation, and if
+she would take it to another prominent dry-goods house, which he named,
+he thought she would at once secure employment. She took the letter of
+commendation, and went as directed. The employing agent of the firm to
+which she was sent asked her how much salary she had been receiving,
+and she answered, "Five dollars a week." He replied, "I cannot pay you
+that much, I can only give you three dollars a week;" to which she
+answered, "I can hardly live on what I have now, and I could not
+possibly live on three dollars a week." He replied, with an insulting
+and meaning smile, "You would have to depend on the outside friend for
+that." She looked him in the eye, and said, "I want to earn an honest
+living, and I don't want any outside friend," and at that walked away.
+She told her employer of her reception; and he said he did not intend
+to discharge her, but had heard that this firm was in the habit of
+doing that sort of thing, and was determined to find out if it were
+true.
+
+I received a letter from a gentleman in Conway, N. H., this week, who
+writes, not knowing that I was intending to discuss this question:
+"After you have given the sweating-system one round, can you not take
+up the question of the girls working in the big stores? I have just
+heard a well-authenticated account of a man high in authority in one of
+the largest stores, suggesting the way to ruin to a young girl from the
+country, who said, when she learned what her wages were to be, that
+they would not be sufficient to give her a bare support. This not only
+shows the attitude of these wealthy merchants to the souls of their
+working-girls, but it shows that they are conscious of their attitude,
+and have deliberately chosen to take it." I am told, upon undoubtedly
+credible testimony, that another young woman who came to Boston from
+the country, and sought work in several stores, was so outraged at the
+vile suggestions which were made to her about means of adding to her
+salary, that she went back to the house of her friend,--a lady of as
+high standing as any in the city,--and cried and sobbed all night long.
+She said she would beg or starve before she would submit herself to
+such outrage again.
+
+It is impossible to turn these incidents aside as exaggerations. They
+are horrible, I know; but the most horrible thing about them is, that
+they are true. You will say perhaps, as some have said during the past
+few weeks of my exposure of the sweat-shops, "What good will it all do,
+this harrowing of people's minds with these cruel stories?"
+
+I do not know how much good will be done. I only know that I could not
+retain my self-respect and keep silent.
+
+Nothing is more foolish than for us to keep still, hoping that in some
+way these wrongs will remedy themselves. Shall we look to the sweater,
+the chattel-mortgage shark, the lecherous merchant, to reform
+themselves? They do not care how long, nor at what a pittance, men and
+women work, or to what fearful extremities they are driven. Reforms
+will never come from the gold-box of Mammon. We must cry aloud and
+spare not until these devilish cruelties and unblushing crimes are
+impossible in our fair city.
+
+The words of the Christ, as interpreted by James Russell Lowell, are
+ringing in my ears:--
+
+  "With gates of silver and bars of gold,
+  Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold.
+  I have heard the dropping of their tears
+  In heaven these eighteen hundred years."
+
+Then if we reply with the selfish assurance of some of these
+pharisaical political economists who are criticising me to-day:--
+
+  "O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
+  We build but as our fathers built;
+  Behold Thine images, how they stand,
+  Sovereign and sole, through all the land."
+
+How his answer will put us to shame and confusion:--
+
+  "Then Christ sought out an artisan,
+  A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
+  And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin,
+  Pushed from her faintly want and sin.
+
+  These set He in the midst of them,
+  And as they drew back their garment-hem,
+  For fear of defilement, 'Lo here,' said He,
+  'The IMAGES ye have made of Me!'"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+THE WAGES AND TEMPTATIONS OF WORKING-PEOPLE.
+
+
+  "Face to face with shame and insult
+    Since she drew her baby breath,
+  Were it strange to find her knocking
+    At the cruel door of death?
+  Were it strange if she should parley
+    With the great arch fiend of sin?"
+
+--ALICE CARY: _The Edge of Doom._
+
+
+I have been asked to give a reason for the faith that is in me in
+regard to certain painful charges made by me in a recent sermon on
+Wages and Morals--to the effect that the persons high in authority in
+some respectable Boston stores regard favorably immoral relations on
+the part of the employees, in order to make it possible for them to
+live on the slender wages paid them.
+
+Without repeating here any of the cases mentioned in my sermon, which
+has had considerable publicity through the daily press, permit me to
+quote Mr. Henry Chase, agent of the Society for the Prevention of
+Crime. He says that in conversation with a leading Boston merchant, the
+merchant said plainly that he had every reason to believe that some of
+the men working in his store paid the room-rent and a trifling sum
+besides to working-girls, and lived with them regularly. Another Boston
+merchant said to Mr. Chase that he regarded that kind of life on the
+part of his clerks favorably; that the wages these young men received
+made it impossible for them to marry and support a wife.
+
+I am informed of another case, upon perfectly credible authority, of
+two young women, strangers in the city, who applied to a leading store
+for a situation and were offered work, but when informed of the wages
+they were to receive, exclaimed, "How could we live on such wages as
+that?" The employment agent of the house replied, "It is presumed you
+will have a gentleman friend to assist you." The girls looked at him
+dumfounded for a moment; and when his meaning dawned upon the one who
+had acted as spokesman, she burst into tears and they hurried from the
+store. Only the dread of bringing unpleasant notoriety to these
+thoroughly respectable young women saved this scoundrel from a
+horsewhipping at the hands of their indignant male relatives.
+
+A leading Boston lady of wealth and social standing, writing to thank
+me for calling public attention to the subject, says that she herself
+knew of a girl who was told to "'look to her gentleman friends' for the
+means to eke out a bare livelihood supplied by her wages in a prominent
+store;" and adds: "Such things are outrageous, and it is well you are
+making them known." I have within the past week received another letter
+from the president of the W. C. T. U. in one of the Boston wards, a
+lady who has had more than twenty-five years' experience in practical
+reform work in this city. She says: "I have just read in my
+_Congregationalist_ the reference to your sermon of last Sunday on the
+officials in two of our large Boston stores suggesting immoral means of
+eking out their scanty wages to their employees. I want to thank you
+for presenting this terrible wickedness existing among us, and if the
+extent could only be known, every white-ribbon woman in Boston would
+boycott those stores. I could call names of splendid young women,
+thrown on their own resources, applying for situations, who were
+cursed, as we might say, with a good face and a fine figure, fairly
+insulted with offers made. More young girls have been ruined in that
+way than in any other. In sheer desperation, not even earning enough to
+pay the rent of a mean attic and keep hunger away, to say nothing of
+clothing and other things, they have, after spending the last cent, and
+not having anything to take them home, resorted to the last means."
+
+This is a terrible letter--terribly true. I could go on, column after
+column, with these details. "But," the critic says, "why don't you name
+these firms, and put them in the pillory of public contempt?" I can
+tell you why in a few words. You cannot name the firms without giving
+the name of the young woman thus wickedly approached; and to name any
+young woman in such a connection, no matter how innocent or pure she
+is, is to put a mark upon her as long as she lives.
+
+No woman is willing to run that gantlet; and so, in the very nature of
+the case, it would rarely happen that you could publicly punish the
+guilty party. "Well, then," says the critic, "you would better hold
+your peace." Let us consider that a moment. If a burglary has been
+committed in town, do you keep silent until you are prepared to name
+the burglar and publicly indict him for trial? No, indeed. You tell all
+the neighbors, and publish in all the newspapers, that such a house has
+been invaded, that burglars are in town. What is the good of doing
+this? Why, any school-boy knows that it is a blessing to every other
+householder in the town. It puts people on their guard, and calls
+special attention to their bolts and locks. If there is any good reason
+why we should not follow the same common-sense course in this matter
+under consideration, I do not know what it is.
+
+I do not bring a broad, sweeping accusation against either class of
+persons especially concerned in this article. I am no defamer of my
+kind. I believe that the majority of Boston merchants are honest,
+pure-minded men. I believe that the majority of Boston working-women,
+old or young, are as pure and noble as any women in the world.
+Nevertheless, I have stated in this article undeniable facts--facts
+which I can substantiate to the satisfaction of any honest man or woman
+who, still doubting, cares to see me personally about the matter. These
+facts are serious enough to give us all reason for solemn and earnest
+reflection.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+BOSTON'S UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.
+
+  "That each should in his house abide,
+  Therefore was the world so wide."
+
+--RALPH WALDO EMERSON: _Fragments of Nature and Life._
+
+When, over one-half of our land, there hung the black pall of African
+slavery, no other one thing, perhaps, did more to reveal the terrible
+cruelty of the system, and to arouse the indignation of the civilized
+world, than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
+
+In June, 1882, when the _elite_ of American literature gathered at
+Boston to celebrate her seventieth birthday, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
+read a poem in which Mrs. Stowe's share in the emancipation of the
+colored race was recorded with equal wit and pathos:--
+
+  "When Archimedes so long ago
+  Spoke out so grandly, '_Dos pou sto_--
+    Give me a place to stand on;
+  I'll move your planet for you now,'
+  He little dreamed or fancied how
+  The _sto_ at last should find its _pou_
+    For woman's faith to land on.
+
+  Her lever was the wand of art,
+  Her fulcrum was the human heart,
+    Whence all unfailing aid is;
+  She moved the earth, its thunders pealed,
+  Its mountains shook, its temples reeled,
+  The blood-red fountains were unsealed,
+    And Moloch sunk to Hades."
+
+Mrs. Stowe, in the preface of her son's biography of herself, aptly
+quotes the words of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth in the "Pilgrim's Progress:"
+"My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my
+courage and skill to him that can get it." May God grant us courage and
+skill to use the memory of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to serve the "white
+slaves" of our own time and city!
+
+To begin by quoting from Mrs. Stowe's famous story: "The cabin of Uncle
+Tom was a small log building close adjoining to 'the house,' as the
+negro _par excellence_ designates his master's dwelling. In front it
+had a neat garden-patch where every summer strawberries, raspberries,
+and a variety of fruits and vegetables flourished under careful
+training." This little log house was a small and crowded dwelling-place
+for Uncle Tom and his wife and little ones, yet it had several things
+in its favor. In the first place it had plenty of sunshine and pure
+air. It was an individual cabin, occupied by Uncle Tom's family alone.
+The climate was sunshiny; and when Uncle Tom's wife, Aunt Chloe, wanted
+to wash, she could build a fire out in the open air, and spread her
+clothing on the fragrant raspberry-bushes, while her woolly-headed
+little flock were sent scampering over the pastures and fields.
+
+Now let us look at the Boston cabins. In the first place, there are no
+individual cabins for the poor. The price of land makes that
+impossible. A big Boston tenement house means from four to ten cabins
+on a floor, and from three to six floors under one roof. In a great
+many of these sunlight is an impossibility. Boston is peculiarly cursed
+with the rear tenement. All through the North End and some parts of the
+West End and "the Cove," there abound dark courts, oftentimes reached
+only by a tunnel, that are almost entirely barren of the sunlight. For
+instance, there is a court off North Street, reached by a tunnel such
+as I have described, where the tenement houses are three deep from the
+street.
+
+[Illustration: COURT OFF NORTH STREET.]
+
+The inside tenement, facing on the court, through most of the year is
+densely packed with people. For a large part of the length of the court
+it is only four feet wide, and the front windows of the house, which is
+three stories in height, look out on the dark wall which is only four
+feet away. On a dark day there is scarcely any light at all in these
+rooms; and on the brightest sunshiny day there is only a little light
+during the middle of the day, and never any direct rays of the sun. I
+found, up in one of these rooms, a young woman with her first-born in
+her arms,--a pale, sickly little child, not yet a year old, that will
+certainly die before the summer is out, if it stays there. This poor
+young mother was born in Maine, and followed her husband down here from
+the green fields and the breath of the pines. The husband works out of
+the city during the day, coming home late in the evening and going out
+in the morning; but all day long the mother and wife is kept here with
+her invalid child. Their faces look like potato-vines that have
+sprouted and grown in the cellar. They are dying for the lack of
+sunshine and pure air.
+
+[Illustration: CELLARWAY LEADING TO UNDERGROUND APARTMENTS.]
+
+Modern science is imperative in its urgent emphasis on the influence of
+light and sunshine on health; and we are told that children brought up
+even in close valleys do not thrive so well as those raised on the
+hillsides or the tablelands, and that families through the generations
+grow smaller in stature, and less vigorous in physical and mental
+force, if much excluded from light and sunshine. He was a wise old
+father who lived out on the plains, and came to visit his son, who had
+moved into a deep mountain gorge. At family prayers he thanked the Lord
+that his son was still well, although he lived where the sun rose at
+nine o'clock in the morning and set at four in the afternoon. But there
+are scores of Boston tenement houses where the sun never rises at all,
+except on the roof-tops, or now and then sends a slant ray, thrown down
+into the dark court in seeming mockery. It is impossible for any one to
+get from language alone, either spoken or written, an adequate idea of
+the loneliness, the sense of gloom, the filth and squalor, of the
+apartments in some of these Boston tenement houses. It requires a
+strong stomach, and a still stronger determination that nothing shall
+thwart you from knowing how your brothers and sisters live, to take you
+the second time into such a place. Go with me into one that is not ten
+minutes' walk from the mansions of wealth and luxury on Beacon Hill. We
+go back through a narrow passage, where you can touch the walls on
+either side of you, and then down some steps into a dark underground
+court. Now you have to bend over almost double till you feel your way
+to a door on your left, and knock. In answer to the "Come," you open
+the door and go in, and are barely able to stand upright inside the
+room. We are in a cellar about ten feet square, and this is separated
+from others like it by a partition. We are really in one room of a big
+cellar stretching under a crowded tenement house over our heads. We
+look around us; and as soon as our eyes get accustomed to the
+darkness--for the only light is from the narrow width of glass,
+reaching from the ground up to the floor which forms the ceiling of the
+room where we stand--we see that this is the den--for you cannot call
+it anything else--of an old man and his wife. They have both passed
+threescore. Their locks are white, and they are no longer able to work
+as hard as formerly.
+
+[Illustration: SICK MAN IN UNDERGROUND APARTMENT.]
+
+
+ They have had children, but they are dead. The two old people, waifs
+from bonny Scotland, have probably made their last move, until the city
+sends around its rough box and dead-cart to take them to their last
+sleep in the Potter's Field. They used to live up-stairs; but as they
+grew older, and were not so spry as formerly, they could no longer pay
+the rent, and therefore moved down till at last they are at the bottom.
+For this den of misery, in which a well-to-do Western farmer would not
+think of keeping his hog, they pay one dollar per week. They have to
+cook, eat, sleep, and do everything else pertaining to domestic life,
+in this one dark, filthy hole. The combination of smells is
+indescribable. But as you begin to sicken and are ready to flee, you
+remember, with a shock, that what sickens you so in five minutes this
+old white-headed man and his wife have to endure day after day, and
+night after night, and on--and on--there is no hope of anything better
+this side of a pauper's grave. Don't blame these old people for not
+keeping their den clean. Nobody could keep it clean. There is no
+sunshine, and only a little while in the day any light at all. It is
+necessarily damp and mouldy. We talk with the old man. He goes fishing
+and does such odd jobs as he is able. He says one of the worst things
+with which they have to contend is the rats; and then he points out
+places in the wall, down next to the ground, that he has filled with
+little billets of wood, stuck in every-which-way, in his efforts to
+keep the rats from preying on them, at night. Let us foot up the
+column.
+
+Old age, with its accompanying weakness and loss of hopefulness and
+courage; darkness, with the brooding sense of gloom and melancholy that
+goes with it; noisome smells, that make even a breath of the narrow,
+crowded street seem like a draught from Paradise; filth, mould, and
+rats that compete with you for what really has been taken from their
+appropriate domain,--and yet remember that down there, in all that, and
+more, for no tongue or pen can tell its wretchedness, live hundreds of
+your brothers and sisters. Not the drunken and the dissolute only, for
+about this place which I have described, or its tenants, there was not
+the slightest suggestion of liquor anywhere. Down on North Street is an
+old house which, the traditions tell us, was originally built for a
+"wayside inn," in the good old days before the word hotel was so well
+known as now. It is not a very large house, as tenement houses go, yet
+the missionary who is with me assures me that he has found as many as
+thirty families stowed away under its roof. A wall is built up around
+the rear and on one side, corralling a little breathing-space or side
+yard. A stable for two horses comes out of this space; and the stench
+from these stalls mingles with the stench of the water-closets which
+are all situated in this yard, and the united fumes rise to every rear
+window of the establishment.
+
+The stairways are rickety and filthy. We go in at two places to sample
+the tenantry. In the first we find an old Irish woman who lives here
+with her two boys. She keeps house for them in two little rooms.
+Everything is poverty-stricken and dirty. The poor old woman is a wreck
+in body and in mind. She has buried seven daughters. She says, "I've
+buried a good flock. Too much trouble broke my very life out of me." We
+go in at another door. Here is an English woman; she has two children
+and keeps a boarder. She scrubs now in a bank building, and washes at
+other places. She sewed for a long time. At first she was paid fourteen
+cents a pair for finishing pants, then thirteen cents, then twelve
+cents, and finally ten cents, and then, as it was impossible to get
+bread for her children on what she could earn, she went to scrubbing.
+Being a very rugged woman physically, she is able to do this. If she
+had been frail and delicate, with a young babe, she would have been
+compelled to keep on finishing pants at ten cents a pair.
+
+[Illustration: AN ANCIENT TENEMENT.]
+
+It is hot and dirty here everywhere. How could it be otherwise? Every
+one of these housekeepers must have a fire in her room every time she
+wants hot water for washing or any other purpose. Take the day of my
+visit,--one of the hottest in June; it is ninety degrees in the shade,
+but with the fire in the rickety stove in the room in which this mother
+and her little girl are working, it cannot be less than a hundred and
+thirty. But the fire cannot go out, or the washing will stop, and there
+will be no food to-morrow. For these two miserable sweat-boxes--the
+paper half torn off, bed-bug dens that nothing could thoroughly cleanse
+except a fire that would exterminate the very walls--she pays two
+dollars and a half per week. As a striking illustration of the good
+results of agitation on these subjects, I called at this house during
+the past week, when one of the tenants told me that my repeated visits
+to the place, and the fact that I had had a photographer there making
+views of it, had awakened so much comment in the section that the
+landlord had got frightened and had had the corridors washed, and had
+put new paper on some of the rooms.
+
+Off Norman Street in the West End is a court which I have visited
+during the past week in company with two other gentlemen. The houses on
+this court are occupied by Italian fruit-venders for the most part.
+
+The court itself is littered up with refuse and decayed fruit in a most
+filthy and unhealthy manner. In one of these large tenement houses
+there is no family which occupies more than one room. Let us
+investigate a few of them. Here is a room fifteen feet long. At its
+narrow end it is only five feet six inches wide, and at the other end
+not quite seven feet wide. In this narrow lane five people live. Huge
+strings of bananas in every stage of ripening hang over the piles of
+filthy bedding. It is in the second story, and the corridor in front,
+which is forty-three inches wide--unusually spacious, as you will see
+later--is half taken up with boxes of decaying fruit, buckets of slops,
+and piles of refuse. The walls are as black and rusty as the stove.
+
+Here is another family residence in this building. The size is ten and
+one-half by ten and one-fourth feet. Four people live here. The entire
+furnishings are not worth five dollars. The cupboard is a lemon-box
+with a partition in it, set on the floor. The bread, kneaded and ready
+to bake, is laid out on an old, dirty, colored handkerchief on the pile
+of bedding; there are no chairs, table, or other furniture of any kind.
+Another room which also answers for home for four people, is sixteen
+feet long and six feet five inches wide. The walls here, as in many
+other rooms, have large sections of the plastering torn off, and are
+blackened with many years of smoke and dirt.
+
+[Illustration: ITALIAN FRUIT-VENDERS AT HOME.]
+
+The next family we visit has three people. The room is seven by nine
+feet. The bed covers all except thirty-one inches on one end, and
+twenty-four inches on one side. There are boxes of fruit under the bed,
+some of it decaying; what is too rotten to sell must serve for home
+consumption. And so we go on, room after room, and floor after floor.
+Now, section fourteen of the law in regard to tenement houses says:
+"The tenant of any lodging-house or tenement house shall thoroughly
+cleanse all the rooms, floors, windows, and doors of the house, or part
+of the house, of which he is the tenant, to the satisfaction of the
+Board of Health; and the owner or lessee shall well and sufficiently,
+to the satisfaction of said board, whitewash and otherwise cleanse the
+walls and ceilings thereof, once at least in _every year_, in the
+months of April or May, and have the privies, drains, and cesspools
+kept in good order, and the passages and stairs kept clean and in good
+condition."
+
+Now, I have no desire or intention to do any injustice to the members
+of the Board of Health. They may be over-worked, and have an
+insufficient force to pay proper attention to their duties; but I state
+only the simple fact--and I am sure it is a fact that the people
+generally ought to know--when I say that there is a shameful and
+dangerous lack of such attention in many of these tenement houses. In
+regard to the houses I have just described the law is a dead letter.
+The passages and stairs are filthy beyond description. Some of these
+corridors are only twenty, twenty-three, and twenty-nine inches wide,
+and yet, dark and narrow as they are, they are largely filled up with
+piles of refuse and garbage. In one of these buildings the water-closet
+on the landing has had the door taken down and put away, so that it
+stands open day and night.
+
+[Illustration: COCKROACHES BY FLASH-LIGHT.]
+
+[Illustration: BANANA SELLER.]
+
+On some of the walls of these living rooms the cockroaches and bed-bugs
+swarm in abundance, literally by hundreds, at ten o'clock in the
+morning. The walls and ceilings have not only _not_ been cleansed or
+whitened this year, but it must have been many years since there has
+been an attempt made to clean them. In one of these bedrooms I counted
+twenty-five boxes of lemons, besides great bunches of half-ripened
+bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms.
+The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every
+section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings,
+far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves
+and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help
+but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these
+filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place,
+for their sign is put up over the doors of these rooms, telling how
+many are allowed to sleep in each room; but they might as well have
+kept the sign in the office for all the good it has done, for in nearly
+every room the inmates admitted to the Italian interpreter who
+accompanied me, that from two to three times as many persons occupied
+the room as the sign permits. One of these buildings, four stories
+high, is so old and rickety that it cannot stand alone, and has
+careened over against the building next to it. Everything is of wood,
+and if it was once on fire, with its narrow, obstructed halls and
+stairways, the swarm of tenants would burn like rats in a trap.
+
+This is by no means an isolated case. When Rev. Mr. Barnett, of
+Whitechapel, London, was here a few days ago, one of the inspectors of
+the Board of Health took him to visit some of the tenement houses of
+South Boston and the North End. A _Boston Herald_ reporter went with
+them, and I quote from his report of the trip: "The party first visited
+the tenement houses of South Boston, occupied for the most part by the
+fishermen and their families, and the poorer classes of the Irish
+population. The first one visited was the house known as the Slate
+block on First Street. Here was seen one of the best examples of the
+worst class of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished
+but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied
+with regarding whitewashing, and the walls were dirty and stained with
+smoke. Hardly a house was seen, in the whole course of the journey,
+where this simple law in the interest of health and sanitary condition
+of living had been observed. In many cases, it appeared as though it
+had not only been neglected this spring, but for many springs in the
+past. In driving from this section of the city to the North End, Mr.
+Barnett made the somewhat startling remark, 'We have nothing nearly so
+bad as this in Whitechapel.'"
+
+[Illustration: UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS.]
+
+
+Doesn't it seem a little strange to an outsider that the Board of
+Health keep on hand, as it were, block after block of tenement houses,
+where both landlords and tenants deliberately set the law at defiance,
+which they can show off at call? There could not be a greater folly
+than to put this question aside as a matter only interesting to those
+poor people themselves. The slavery of Uncle Tom and his woolly-headed
+children cursed the plantation house, in the end, as much as it did the
+cabin. We must look after these people and help them for the sake of
+others, if not on their own account. Dr. John S. Billings, in an
+address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in
+February of this year, says: "When diphtheria prevails in a tenement
+house, many school children are endangered, and the most perfect
+plumbing in a house affords little protection against the entrance of
+this disease, if it is prevailing in the vicinity. Typhus and smallpox
+do not confine their ravages to the vicious and foul, after they have
+acquired malignancy amongst them. Mingled with those who might not be
+worth saving, is a much larger number of honest, industrious, and
+fairly intelligent and energetic poor people who live by days' wages,
+and are struggling against their surroundings to improve their
+condition, and especially to give their children a fairer chance in the
+race for life than they themselves have had. These last are the people
+whom it is worth while to help for their own sake. You will observe,"
+says this cool-headed doctor, "that I am considering this matter
+entirely from the money point of view, without reference to religion or
+morals or altruism. The question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is far
+more important, I admit; but I confine myself to a lower plane--to the
+bread-and-butter aspects of municipal life. Great numbers of the
+incompetent, vicious, idle, deformed, or starved-brain class have been
+poured into this country by immigration during the last fifty years,
+and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums,
+alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results
+of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited
+result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but
+hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are
+from two to three times as great as those of the better class of
+population; one-fourth of their sickness is treated by charities, and
+one-third of those who die among them are buried at public expense. The
+districts in which they live require a larger proportion of the work of
+city officials, inspections, removal of nuisances, police, the courts,
+etc.; and, on the other hand, they contribute but little to municipal
+or other taxation. All this is well known; but we have not yet arrived
+at the stage of applying efficient and systematic prevention, which is
+perfectly possible, and are still pottering with the so-called remedies
+which are of little use. In these districts the deaths usually
+outnumber the births, so that if it were not for a continued stream of
+new recruits this population would diminish. How can accessions be
+prevented? One way is to get rid of and prevent additions to the kind
+of dwellings these people seek. Do you say that they must live
+somewhere, and that there must be such places for such people? I do not
+think so. It is not necessary that any city should allow the existence
+of any such houses within its limits; and if their destruction forces
+some persons into the almshouses, and drives others away, it will be
+the cheapest and best in the end."
+
+There are scores, and I think I should be safe to say hundreds, of
+tenement houses within the city limits of Boston which are unfit to be
+inhabited, and where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of
+health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a
+sufficiently large rent to pay good interest on a clean, healthful
+tenement. Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike
+challenged by this condition of things.
+
+Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston "cabins" and their
+miserable tenants, you will say, "They are at least free, they cannot
+be bought and sold like Uncle Tom." Alas! they are not free. True, no
+one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the
+less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I
+have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and
+women were making a fine class of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen
+pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find it
+impossible to save. The lower strata of wages in Boston, and in all our
+large cities, has reached the point where the people who depend on them
+labor simply to exist. One day's sickness in father or mother or child
+leaves a gap it takes weeks or months to bridge over again.
+
+[Illustration: TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING.]
+
+Sometimes a Southern Uncle Tom or Aunt Chloe had their son or daughter
+sold out of their arms, leaving them with broken hearts. But the white
+slaves of the tenement house sound every deep of human agony. Think
+what it is to try to raise boys honest, when their playmates are
+thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the
+wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did
+only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of lust had devoured her one ewe
+lamb before she was yet thirteen years of age! Brothers, it is not yet
+time for the "abolitionist" to put aside his tocsin or his sword while
+so many of our brothers and sisters are living and sighing in their
+despair:--
+
+  "Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
+  Forgetting that the world is fair;
+
+  Where no babe we cherish lest its soul perish,
+  Where our mirth is crime, our love a snare."
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+SOCIAL MICROBES IN BOSTON TENEMENT HOUSES, AND HOW TO DESTROY THEM.
+
+
+  "Ring in the valiant man and free,
+    The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
+    Ring out the darkness of the land,
+  Ring in the Christ that is to be."
+
+--ALFRED TENNYSON: _In Memoriam._
+
+
+ The greatest claim Job ever makes for himself is that in the days of
+his prosperity, when everybody knew him and was obsequious to him as a
+rich man, he was not only kind to the poor, but exhibited for them a
+genuine sympathy which was illustrated in his carefully searching out
+the causes of their troubles.
+
+There is a good deal that passes for kindness and sympathy, in these
+days, that is nothing more than lazy good-nature. Ignorant or
+indifferent charity is often as mischievous in its results as the
+wicked greed of the skinflint and the miser. Sympathy, to be worth any
+thing, must be incarnated, as in Job's case, so that it becomes feet to
+the lame and eyes to the blind. Frances Power Cobbe declares that the
+most Christ-like thing she ever heard from human lips, was from the
+"Good Earl" of Shaftesbury:--
+
+  "The friend of all the friendless 'neath the sun;
+    Whose hand had wiped away a thousand tears;
+  Whose eloquent lips and clear, strong brain have done
+    God's holy service through his fourscore years."
+
+When he was speaking to her one day, in his study, of the wrongs of
+young girls, which he had just been investigating, the tears came to
+his eyes and his voice trembled. After a pause, he added, "When I feel
+how old I am, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong, but I
+feel I cannot bear to go and leave the world with all the misery in
+it."
+
+People who have no genuine sympathy for their fellows, oftentimes grow
+harder-hearted at a revelation of the miseries of the oppressed, which
+stirs nobler souls to their profoundest depths and awakens them to all
+manner of helpful benevolence. There is an old legend of St. Hilary
+Loricatus, who scourged himself so perpetually that his skin became
+like the hide of a rhinoceros. So, acquaintance with the sorrows and
+woes of the poor and unfortunate, acquired out of a morbid curiosity,
+or a hunger for that kind of emotion experienced by the reader of
+sensational novels, will result only in marring and hardening us.
+
+Very different is the result of such knowledge when obtained through an
+earnest sympathy and a holy ambition to assuage the sorrows of the
+distressed. Shelley never wrote anything more beautiful, perhaps, than
+this:--
+
+  "In sacred Athens, near the fane
+    Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood;
+  Serve not the unknown God in vain,
+  But pay that broken shrine again,
+    Love for hate, and tears for blood."
+
+I put this emphasis on the need of searching out the wrongs of the
+poor, because I am satisfied that one of the greatest factors in the
+present tenement-house situation is the ignorance and indifference of
+the people as to the condition of things in the slum tenement house. I
+am sure that nothing but good can come from an honest attempt to "let
+in the light of day upon the landlordism of the slums, as you have let
+it in upon Mormonism, and other hateful things that prefer darkness
+rather than light."
+
+We need to bear in mind constantly, in considering this question, that
+society is a whole, and that an evil in one class of our citizenship
+cannot help but have its vicious influence, in a greater or less
+degree, upon every other portion of society. We must also remember that
+the bad tenement house is the birthplace and cradle, and to a large
+extent the schoolroom, of multitudes of boys and girls who are to exert
+their influence on every phase of our city life in the near future.
+Modern scientists have pursued the study of disease microbes with such
+diligence, that they claim to be able to recognize beyond mistake the
+germs of certain diseases. They find them in the atmosphere almost
+everywhere, and they prove that these microbes are real germs of
+disease, by their experiments with the lower animals.
+
+The soil under our feet is full of these micro-organisms. The smallest
+quantity of earth put in water reveals, through the microscope, besides
+the organic and mineral matter, a mass of beings more or less complex,
+moving more or less rapidly. A German author, Mr. Reimers, has
+calculated that every cubic centimetre of earth may contain several
+million germs.
+
+[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF A NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE.]
+
+Among these microbes some have not been studied, and the part they play
+in the economy of life is not known to us, while certain others have
+functions which have been well determined. Carbuncle, for instance, is
+one of the most terrible maladies which can attack cattle, and
+sometimes even men. Now-a-days, thanks to the labors of the scientists,
+this malady had become quite rare, and tends more and more to
+disappear. For a long time it has been known that carbuncle has been
+due to a particular microbe, but it was not known how it was
+propagated. M. Pasteur has demonstrated that this propagation was due,
+in part at least, to the longevity of the germs.
+
+Thus it is, if you bury the dead body of an animal which has died of
+carbuncle, in a ditch five or six feet deep, and cover it with earth,
+the carbuncle bacteria will be found in the neighboring soil several
+years after the interment. We can understand, then, that cattle put to
+graze on this land, or fed by provender from it, may contract the
+disease. So when the cause of this malady was unknown, it is not to be
+wondered at that superstitious country people called these places
+"cursed fields."
+
+There are social microbes no less potent and mischievous than those
+with which Pasteur deals. Some of those who are infected with the
+contagion are put away in pest-houses or in prisons; many more walk the
+streets, and spread their dangerous infection through the social,
+business, and home life of the people. My claim is that the bad
+tenement house in Boston, as everywhere else where people are herded
+together in crowded filthy quarters, where sanitary laws are neglected
+or defied either by landlords or tenants, or both, furnishes a
+breeding-place for the microbes of nearly every sin and vice that
+infest our modern society. The editor of the Portland _Oregonian_,
+commenting on General Booth's scheme for the rescue of the London poor,
+says: "Its most hopeful features are those which propose to provide the
+lowly with means to help themselves, in the building and maintenance of
+homes. Thousands of women belonging to the 'submerged tenth' need
+almost as much instruction in the simple acts of housewifely thrift and
+neatness, as the squaws belonging to the North American Indian tribes.
+
+[Illustration: WIDOW AND TWO CHILDREN IN UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT.]
+
+
+"Homes, in the civilized sense of the term, they have never had to
+keep, and their squalid abiding-places, overrun with wretched and
+quarrelsome half-clad children, and bare of the commonest comforts of
+life, have offered very unattractive fields for womanly originality and
+painstaking endeavor. A cheerful, quiet home, wherein the laborer is
+always sure of warmth and light and wholesome food, has in it a saving
+grace which all the creeds in Christendom cannot compass without its
+auxiliary aid."
+
+The power of the liquor traffic, and all the other kindred vices that
+cluster about it, is constantly re-enforced by the social conditions of
+the neglected tenement house. Temptation enters as largely into
+drunkenness as into any other vice; and in the foul and fetid courts of
+the North End, the West End, South Boston, and the Cove, temptation to
+vice of every kind is ever present. The words of George R. Simms, in
+his earnest study of life in the homes of the London poor, apply with
+equal force to such sections in Boston: "The complete lack of home
+comforts, the necessity of dulling every finer sense in order to endure
+the surrounding horrors, the absence of anything to enter into
+competition with the light and glitter of the gin palace, and the
+cheapness of the drink in comparison with food, all these contribute
+to make the poor easy victims to intemperance. Among the poor,
+the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life,
+and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their condition,
+do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush
+for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican
+dispenses at so much a glass. Ask any of the temperance workers
+in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have
+watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighborhood,
+and gradually sink under the degrading influences of their
+surroundings. There are a few men who have worked to keep their
+brethen from the clutches of the drink fiend who would not gladly hail
+the advent of air, light, and cleanliness, and the enforcement of
+sanitary laws, as the best weapons with which to do doughty deeds in
+their combats with intemperance among the poor."
+
+One of the hardest things to deal with, in an attempt to arouse good
+people who are well-to-do and steadily prosperous to a serious study of
+the troubles of the poor, is to shake them out of the erroneous
+conviction that it is always the fault of the poor that they are in
+financial straits and compelled to resort to such places of dwelling.
+Put yourself in your brother's place, and listen to this true story of
+New England life enacted during the past year.
+
+There lived, until a little over a year ago, in Western New York, a
+family which we will call Simmons,--far removed from the real name. The
+family consisted of the husband and wife, each about thirty-five years
+of age, and four children,--the eldest ten. Mr. Simmons was a
+confectioner by trade, but for some years had been travelling for a
+wholesale grocer's house in New York. He was a man of good address, and
+was fairly successful until, in some of the competitions of trade, the
+New York house determined to withdraw from that section, and he was
+thrown out of business. After casting about for several weeks in a vain
+attempt to get employment, he decided to bring his family with him to
+New England. They removed to Worcester, where for months he sought
+employment, but was unable to find anything except short jobs for a day
+or two at a time. Mrs. Simmons, who was an educated and refilled woman,
+and a most worthy lady in every respect, did what she could to assist
+her husband; but as a fifth child was born to them in the autumn, she
+was so weakened by sickness and the care of her children, that she
+could do little besides looking after them. As the months passed, they
+were compelled to resort to the pawnshop--the bank of the unfortunate.
+First went their silverware, which was mostly wedding presents, an
+anguish to part with to people of their history and character. Then
+followed their best clothing, and some splendid books out of a
+well-selected library--for remember that these were educated,
+intelligent people, with all the instincts and tastes of good breeding.
+Finally, discouraged with Worcester, they removed, with what they had
+left, to Boston. Again for weary days, stretching into weeks, went on
+the disheartening search for work. Mr. Simmons says in those days the
+very iron entered into his soul. To see his refined, cultivated wife
+sick and wasting away, his children improperly clothed and hungry, and
+compelled, day by day, to return to the tenement house on the filthy
+street whither his condition had forced him, with a feeling of utter
+helplessness, he declares that nothing but the religious convictions of
+his youth, and the sense of the cowardice of the act, saved him from
+the death of the suicide.
+
+[Illustration: THE BANK OF THE UNFORTUNATE.]
+
+During the winter they were compelled to sell their excellent
+cooking-range, which they had brought with them from New York, and
+procure a cheaper one. All the books that were left followed; then the
+bedsteads and other furniture went, until there was only one bedstead
+left, and that was rented through the day to a man who worked nights.
+Many days they had nothing to eat but bread or crackers--and often that
+was of a stale quality and a scant allowance. The eldest, a little boy,
+attended the Sunday-school of a Boston church; he has one of the
+truest, noblest, and most interesting faces I have ever seen. On
+missing him for a couple of Sundays, the superintendent of the school
+went in search of him, and for the first time knew of the condition of
+the family.
+
+[Illustration: OUT OF WORK.]
+
+
+The Sunday-school superintendent found his little scholar lying in a
+dry-goods box,--for there was no bed in the daytime,--sick from lack of
+food and clothing. He made inquiries of the mother, and at last, with
+sobs and tears, she told their story. Their necessities were relieved,
+and through the sympathetic interest of a number of Christian men the
+husband now has steady employment. Now, it is easy to say that he
+should have gone to the church, or the charities, with the story of his
+condition--and I think that is true; but, on the other hand, you can
+see that it was the very worthiness of the family, their very nobility,
+that made that course seem more bitter than starvation. Bear in mind
+that these people were not dissipated, that they were strictly moral
+and religious, and that both father and mother were of prepossessing
+appearance. This man did not drink, or smoke, or chew, and was
+intensely anxious to take care of his family; he was willing to do the
+humblest work, and preferred death to begging or dishonor.
+
+Only a few weeks since, I called, with a brother minister, on a family
+of Maine people in a miserable tenement house in the North End. The
+husband and father had been sick and out of work for a good while. A
+short time before my visit, however, he had shipped on a coaster from
+Hyannis to Philadelphia. He had arranged for a little credit for his
+family to keep them from starving, until his expected return; but the
+winds had been contrary, and he was several days overdue. The wife and
+four children were in despair. They had had nothing since the morning
+of the day before, and then only bread and water, except a little broth
+which a neighbor, not much better off, brought in to one of the
+children--a beautiful little girl, sick with what would be "la grippe"
+on Beacon Hill, but is only "grip" down in the slums. The mother had a
+little babe, and was in such delicate health that it was impossible for
+her to go out to wash or scrub. Her two narrow little rooms were
+scrupulously neat and clean, as were her children; but the tears ran
+down her cheeks as, in answer to our questions, she confessed, as if
+she had been admitting a crime, poor soul, that they had had nothing to
+eat all day.
+
+I give you these instances to show you how false is the idea that
+poverty and enforced residence in a miserable tenement house are a
+badge of sin or wrong-doing. But think of the agony of fathers and
+mothers, who love their children as well as you love yours, and have
+ambitions for them as holy and pure, who are compelled to see their
+loved ones deteriorating under their eyes, and through the
+contamination of the poisonous moral atmosphere which they breathe,
+dropping slowly, but certainly, down to a level with the brutality
+which surrounds them.
+
+[Illustration: A CHEAP LODGING-HOUSE.]
+
+Well, you ask, what is the remedy for all this? My main purpose, in
+this series of discourses, was to place the facts of the situation
+before the people. But I have some plain, practical, common-sense
+suggestions to make. In the first place, we want an almost _infinitely_
+better system of inspection of tenement houses. Every tenement house in
+the city, having as many as eight families in it, ought to be inspected
+carefully, at least once a month--and once a week would be better--by
+an officer who holds his place under civil-service rules, entirely
+independent of politics, and who is held to a strict responsibility for
+the performance of his duties.
+
+As to the tenement-house sweat-shop, I am convinced that a very simple
+law, which ought to be passed by the next legislature, requiring every
+manufacturer, of any kind, to file with the inspector of factories a
+list of the names and addresses of the people who work for him, would
+work wonders. It may be that there are some firms as low down as the
+one whose superintendent remarked the other day, when asked what the
+effect would be in their business if it were known that their goods
+were manufactured in filthy tenement houses: "It would make no
+difference at all; our customers would buy of us just the same, no
+matter where our garments were made." This firm, I am sure, would find
+itself mistaken, and, with a great many others, would break off its
+connection with the sweating-business if the law forced it to make that
+relation public.
+
+Yet I am sure that nothing promises so much for reform as a revival of
+conscientious landlordism. The landlord is now, too often, as one well
+says, "an enormous wealthy estate, with heirs scattered here and there,
+who hire an agent, as their Southern brothers hired an overseer,
+irresponsible, unsympathetic, caring only to please his patrons, by
+showing a large balance of profit. And the poorer the tenement, the
+larger the balance. No repairs, no janitor, no supervision to pay for;
+accommodations so wretched that only the very wretched, who will expect
+to be crowded and miserable, will apply for it. O landlord! or
+'estate!' too busy to collect your own rents, be not too indolent to
+require of your agent a strict account when he brings you twenty per
+cent instead of six! You would quickly bring him to book if he were
+suddenly to hand you six instead of twenty, but the time to question
+him is when it is twenty."
+
+Mrs. Alice Wellington Rollins says in the _Forum_, speaking of New
+York: "Nothing is more astonishing, in investigating the slums, than
+the discovery of the enormous prices the poor are paying for the most
+wretched accommodations. One man boasts that he draws thirty-three per
+cent on his tenement investments." The same writer wisely says,
+farther: "The landlord is not to be a philanthropist, willing to
+sacrifice himself for the good of others; he is to be an intelligent
+capitalist, putting in his money purely as an investment, and
+philanthropic only to the degree of being satisfied with six per cent
+returns, of hiring a janitor to be on hand day and night, of being his
+own agent, or keeping a sharp lookout on the one he may have to employ,
+and of urging his wife to collect the rents. But individual landlordism
+need not necessarily be confined to individual persons. Individual
+corporations can become landlords. Why should not some of the insurance
+companies that complain of being unable to find suitable investments
+for their immense funds, take hold of the tenement question? A
+life-insurance company of Boston, complaining of the low rates of
+interest obtainable, announce that they never expect over five per
+cent, and find it difficult at times to get four.
+
+"Half of the trouble is caused by the wilful cruelty, but half by the
+thoughtlessness, of the landlords. A wise writer has said recently:
+'Often you don't need to say to a man, "_Why_ do you do so?" If you can
+show him _what_ he is doing, it is often enough to rouse him to
+reform.' I have faith enough in human nature to believe that if we
+could organize a procession of landlords and compel them to walk
+through the tenement districts, they would begin the reform
+themselves."
+
+Let me relate to you a very interesting experiment that has indeed long
+since passed the era of experiment. In 1879 Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln and a
+young lady friend were so wrought upon by the filth and misery which
+they saw in certain tenement houses visited by them, in connection with
+the Associated Charities, that they determined to do something to
+better the condition of these poor people. They hired a large house on
+the corner of Chardon and Merrimac Streets. It contained twenty-seven
+tenements, and the rent agreed upon with the owner was one thousand
+dollars a year, though since the first year they have paid twelve
+hundred. The house had the worst possible reputation morally, and had
+been under the ban of the police for a long time.
+
+It was, at the time they took it, half empty, because of the degraded
+character of the occupants. Its entries and corridors were blackened
+with smoke, and dingy and uninviting. The sinks were in dark corners,
+and were foul and disease-breeding. The stairways were innocent of
+water or broom, and throughout the entire house, from top to bottom,
+ceilings, walls, stairways--everything was dirty and neglected. It was
+surely not an attractive task to attempt to bring cleanliness and order
+out of such chaos, but these resolute young reformers deliberately set
+themselves to perform the seemingly impossible. The interior was
+painted, improved means of lighting and ventilating the sinks were
+ordered, and wood and coal closets arranged for each tenement on its
+own landing.
+
+[Illustration: THE "GOOD LUCK" TENEMENT HOUSE.]
+
+Previously the tenants had to keep their fuel in the cellar. The mouldy
+wall-paper was removed from the entries, and a fresh surface of
+plastering was put on. A few of the worst tenants had to be removed,
+but the majority, pleased with the new administration of things, were
+willing to accept its rules and remain. Tenants were soon found for
+every room; and this house, which had been regarded as very unhealthy,
+and had been a regular hive for fevers under the old _regime_ of
+carelessness and greed, that did not care how dirty the tenants were so
+long as they paid their rent, under the new rule of cleanliness became
+so healthy that disease was almost unknown, and was, and is to this
+day, known by the tenants and the neighborhood generally as the "Good
+Luck House." The ladies collected their own rents, and kept everything
+well under their own supervision. A close account was kept of all
+receipts and expenditures, and at the end of the first year the balance
+of cash in hand was $111.67, or more than eleven per cent on the
+investment. The second year it was still more profitable, the net sum
+at the end of the year being $157.47. Mrs. Lincoln still carries on the
+administration of the "Good Luck House," and no queen was ever treated
+with more genuine respect than she is there. She is regarded as a most
+practical sort of patron saint to the institution. Yet there is no
+element of charity suggested in her dealings with her tenants. It is
+simply Christian justice. She seeks with great care to help them retain
+their self-respect, and treats them as fully her equal in personal
+responsibility. The rent is required to be paid regularly. One rigid
+rule enforced upon all tenants is cleanliness. She pays for the weekly
+scrubbing of the halls and stairways, but the tenants are required to
+sweep them every day, in turn. The sinks and drains are kept clean. All
+this has a marvellous effect on the home habits of the inmates; and I
+have seen as clean and tidy rooms in the "Good Luck" tenement house as
+I have seen anywhere, and that, too, on days when they were caught
+unawares, it not being the regular rent day, when they expect the
+landlady. All above six per cent has been put in the bank as an
+emergency fund, and, from time to time, the tenants have been permitted
+to share some unexpected pleasure from this. Once a splendid
+entertainment was given the tenants, in a public hall, with
+stereopticon views; at another time, it took a more material method of
+expression, and a good blanket, a pitcher and basin for each family,
+came out of this fund. In every way the tenants are made to know that
+their interests are in perfect harmony with those of the landlady. To
+encourage them to use more room, where they are able to pay for it, a
+discount is made on each additional room taken, and ten cents a week is
+deducted for payment in advance. A majority of them avail themselves of
+this privilege.
+
+If he who makes a tree to grow where none grew before, is a public
+benefactor, surely she who has made it possible for many family-trees
+to grow and thrive, yielding their fragrance and their fruit in a pure
+home and social life, is a benefactress in the highest sense.
+
+Let us encourage on every side the transformation of filthy, neglected
+tenements into "Good Luck" houses.
+
+[Illustration: THE SAND GARDEN.]
+
+
+A little wise thoughtfulness may vastly improve the childhood of the
+slums. Boys' clubs and girls' clubs are steps in the right direction.
+They awaken an interest in innocent games, afford a glimpse of
+beautiful pictures, and give zest to the intellectual appetite for
+fresh, wholesome books. The "sand garden" is also a happy thought.
+Think of thousands of children reared in the narrowest, filthiest
+quarters, who have never had a chance to make even a mud-pie out in the
+pure air of heaven. It may seem a small thing to some, but it is a
+tragedy to me. When I remember my own happy childhood over in the
+Oregon woods, where I ran as free and untrammelled as a young colt in
+the pasture, and made mud-pies beside the brook that had its home in a
+great bubbling spring on the hillside, breathing the air fragrant with
+the perfume of wild lilies, while robins and bobolinks and meadow larks
+sported and sang without fear, on every side--when I contrast a
+childhood like that with the child-life in the Boston slums, I am
+heart-broken. There is nothing so sad as this "murder of the innocents"
+that is going on in all our great cities. Marianne Farningham sings
+their dirge:--
+
+  "Such sights there are in the great sin-soiled city,
+  As might compel an angel into pity;
+  But none more sad in all the world of care,
+  Than a young child driven to black despair!"
+
+Surely, trumpet blast never called men and women to a holier crusade
+than this rescue of the lost childhood of the slums.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+OLD WORLD TIDES IN BOSTON.
+
+
+  "There is a poor blind Samson in this land,
+    Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
+  Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
+    And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
+  Till the vast temple of our liberties
+    A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies."
+
+--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: _The Warning_.
+
+
+Travellers tell us that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are
+still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down
+through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the
+gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was
+above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and
+stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the
+result of some strange convulsion of the earth, the coast-line has sunk
+down and down, until the incoming tide of the salt sea has swept over
+it, and schools of porpoises and fishes swim among the branches of old
+forest trees that in the former time were accustomed to the chatter of
+squirrels and songs of birds.
+
+Any one studying the older and more historic sections of Boston will
+see many relics of a past civilization by which he will be impressed in
+very much the same way as is the sailor who looks on the remains of an
+ancient forest in the ocean's bed. Standing in the North End, in front
+of the "Copp's Hill Burying-ground," and looking up at the tower of
+Christ Church where the famous signal lanterns were hung, one can
+almost hear the old church appropriating the words of the poet:--
+
+  "By time's highway--a milestone gray--
+    I watch the world march by;
+  An endless stream of moving men
+    Rolls on beneath mine eye.
+  Still, still they go; where, none can know;
+    And when one wave is gone,
+  Another and another yet
+    Come ever surging on."
+
+It seems strange indeed to go up and down some of these old historic
+streets, and yet never in the course of one's walk hear spoken the
+language of the country. In the course of my investigations during the
+past few months, I have found it impossible to do anything practical
+without an interpreter, sometimes in one language, and again in
+another. Often in entering an old rear tenement house, where filth and
+misery held riot, I have been astonished at the splendidly carved
+ornaments over the doorways, and the still-to-be-traced carving on the
+balustrade. Once these old rear tenements were the abodes of Boston's
+wealthiest and most cultivated citizens; but the Old World tide has
+come in, and house after house, block after block, and street upon
+street, have been overwhelmed by the waves of people who speak other
+languages, and whose habits of life are more foreign than their speech.
+
+[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH TOWER.]
+
+I have no sympathy with those people who are crying out against all
+foreigners, yet it seems to me that no serious student of the signs of
+the times can take other than a sober view of the submerging tide of
+foreign immigration which has come into this country, of which the
+North End of Boston is a suggestive illustration. The consideration
+which causes the most sober thought among earnest men to-day, is the
+entirely different class of immigration coming to us now from that of
+former times. In the earlier days of American history it was the
+intelligent, self-reliant part of the European communities who dared
+the expense and hardship of the long sea voyage by a sailing-vessel,
+and faced the exigencies of the New World. The immigrants of those days
+were mostly farmers and skilled mechanics, who brought with them the
+habit and prestige of success. But under the new order of things, with
+the great steam ferries which make a passage to America only a brief
+holiday trip of a week, with reduced rates, and controlled by companies
+who scour every European city, by aid of their agents, to gather in
+their human cargoes from the poorest and most ignorant of all the labor
+classes, it becomes a very different question.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE CUNARDER.]
+
+The motives that impel people to this country now, are very different
+from what they used to be. The San Francisco _Alta_ well says: "The
+time was when the majority of foreign immigrants came because of an
+intelligent devotion to free government. Ninety-nine per cent of them
+were free from merely material motives. They were not urged by
+starvation, they did not come in the squalid steerage, they did not, on
+landing, feel compelled to invent servile occupations, before unknown
+in this country, merely to get the crusts and scraps that would keep
+them alive. Their motive was intellectual more than material. Their
+descendants are found in every State, of good report, foremost among
+the fibres that make up American character. Their blood may have been
+in the beginning English, Irish, Scotch, French, Italian, Spanish,
+German, Scandinavian, or Slav. No matter: they are now Americans,
+because the expatriation of their ancestors was real, and not unreal.
+Its motive was ethical, and not material. At present ninety-nine per
+cent of all immigrants come for material reasons only. Their decision
+to migrate to the United States is not for lack of liberty, but for
+lack of bread. The purpose is animal entirely. Every old emigrant from
+any country in Europe knows this to be so. The Italian who genuinely
+expatriated himself, who believed in Joseph Mazzini, and sought liberty
+for its own sake, finds no fraternity in the Italian immigration that
+has poured upon us since the suppression of the murder guilds of
+Sicily, and the decline of the industry of assassination in that
+country."
+
+[Illustration: ON THE WAY TO THE RABBI.]
+
+
+ I think it is indeed one of the hopeful features of the situation that
+nearly all our adopted citizens, who are themselves thoroughly
+Americanized, share strongly in this view. Indeed, many of them seem to
+realize the danger more keenly than do the native-born citizens. I was
+very much interested, at the New England Chautauqua the other day, to
+hear Mr. John M. Langston, the colored orator of Virginia, read a
+letter from a leading Hebrew of Washington City, in which he reminded
+Mr. Langston that he had often pleaded the cause of the Negro, and
+appealed to him in turn to plead the cause of the Hebrew, by arousing
+public sentiment against the too rapid influx of Russian Jews.
+
+[Illustration: PASSING THE QUARANTINE DOCTOR.]
+
+The swift incoming of these Old World tides has very close relation to
+the wages of laboring people. Large numbers of the alien laborers who
+are coming now, are little better than "slaves of contractors,
+steamship lines, and the professional European jobbers in pauper labor.
+The large proportion of those engaged in our mines and on public works
+have been secured through these sources, either in direct defiance of
+our laws or by the evasion of the laws. They come in direct competition
+with the native-born and the worthy foreign immigrant, who comes here
+for the purpose of applying for citizenship and securing a home. They
+not only come into competition with every worthy class of laborers, but
+they are, for the most part, too ignorant to comprehend American
+institutions, and have no broader idea of liberty than to insist that
+it includes license. At every point of contact with our labor system,
+they debase it."
+
+An illustration of this class of labor may be found in the fact that a
+year or two ago forty-seven alien miners employed in phosphate mines
+near Waterboro, S.C., were imprisoned because they refused to fulfil
+the contract under which they had been employed. Their story was that
+they had been met at Castle Garden by labor agents who induced them to
+sign a paper which they did not understand, but which proved to be a
+contract to work for one and two dollars a week in the phosphate mines,
+and board themselves. When they learned, on their first payday, of the
+trick which had been played upon them, they revolted. A few days in
+jail, however, induced them to return to work on the old terms.
+
+The Chicago _America_, commenting on the incident, says this picture is
+a startling contrast to the prate of demagogues concerning the dignity
+of American labor. While they scheme to get the votes of intelligent
+workingmen, labor in many parts of this country is being enslaved by
+means of the hordes of foreigners who are imported in violation of law
+and right. Mr. Powderly tells, in the _North American Review_, of a
+visit which he paid to a mining-camp to investigate the condition of
+the men who were imported to take the places of American workmen who
+had demanded higher wages for labor done. These men lived in huge
+barracks. Their dining-room, smoking-room, sitting-room, kitchen, and
+bedchamber were one. There were five rows of bunks, three deep, each
+one thirty inches in width and seventy-eight inches long--the first
+bunk eighteen inches from the floor, the next, supported by rough
+hemlock posts, but two feet above it, and a third two feet above the
+second one. Each bunk was filled with straw, and covered with coarse
+coffee-sack material for bed-clothing. Two rows of hemlock boards, each
+one twenty feet in length by three feet in width, constituted the
+tables. The men came in from the mines while he was present, and,
+before washing face or hands, sat down to their supper of salt pork,
+meal, and water. One hundred and five men lived in a building one
+hundred and sixty feet in length by thirty feet in width. He found no
+one to answer him in the English tongue. When it was bedtime they lay
+down without divesting themselves of a single article of clothing; some
+of them took off their shoes, but the majority did not even do that.
+These men took the places of American workmen who were receiving from
+two dollars to two dollars and a half per day. The compensation allowed
+them was but seventy-five cents a day, and board. As a careful
+investigation proved that fifteen and three-eighths cents would provide
+the food furnished each man, the outlay was but ninety and
+three-eighths cents a day. It is getting to be quite a common custom on
+railroads and in mines and other places where this class of laborers
+are employed, to attach to the waistband of each man a leather strap
+fastened to a large brass check, similar to a baggage check. Every
+check bears a number, and the man who carries it, or to whom it is
+fastened, is known by the number on his check. Mr. Powderly grimly
+comments: "Fancy the future of the American laborer, whose name is
+forgotten, and whose only means of identification rests with a brass
+check, which may be substituted for another while he sleeps." If this
+is not white slavery, what is it?
+
+These Old World tides have also close relation to the health of our
+cities. Large numbers of these people have been accustomed to live in
+crowded quarters, on insufficient food, and without any regard for
+cleanliness, in their native country. They come here, bringing all
+their filthy habits, bred in them sometimes for generations. I have no
+doubt that some of my critics tell the truth when they say that the
+squalid tenements occupied by the Russian Jews and Italians in Boston
+are better than the homes whence they came. So far as these foreigners
+themselves are concerned, even these wretched conditions are perhaps an
+upward step in evolution. But if we are going to have Naples in Boston,
+we must expect to have Neapolitan cholera epidemics as well.
+
+[Illustration: SURGICAL THEOLOGY.]
+
+These Old World tides have also a very close relation to the morals of
+our people. An overwhelming majority of all the criminals who figure in
+our police courts, and are supported in our jails and penitentiaries,
+were born abroad. This is very easy to understand when one investigates
+a little the methods used to encourage emigration to this country. The
+investigation made by the Ford Congressional committee revealed the
+enormous extent to which steamship companies are drumming Europe for
+human freight, to be dumped on our shores. "To those unscrupulous
+'fishers of men' everything that walks or crawls is acceptable.
+Quantity, not quality, is the desideratum. The worse the specimen, the
+more effective, usually, is the emigration prize offered, and the less
+the opposition interposed by government officials. In a word, a
+drag-net has been thrown over nearly the entire European continent,
+with the result of having recently collected for shipment to this
+country a class of humanity, which, wherever it may be, is a menace to
+good order and a tax upon the police and charity departments of the
+country."
+
+One who speaks with the highest authority on questions of political
+economy puts the immigration problem in a strong light when he says:
+"We are now draining off great stagnant pools of population which no
+current of intellectual or moral activity has stirred for ages.
+Thousands and hundreds of thousands of those who represent the very
+lowest stage of degradation to which human beings can be reduced by
+hopelessness, hunger, squalor, and superstition, are found among the
+new citizens whom the last decade has brought into the Republic." It is
+known beyond doubt that prisoners' aid societies in various European
+countries have been steadily shipping convicts to the United States.
+Neither has it been an uncommon thing for criminals to be let off by
+the courts, on condition of their emigrating to America. It is folly
+for us to expect to take this great criminal class, who were born to
+crime in the purlieus of European cities, who have been thieves from
+their cradles, and who come to us fresh from jails and prisons, and
+change them into useful citizens. They will not only continue to be
+criminals themselves, but they will spread their vile and wicked
+contagion wherever they go. There is not a single cause of reform or
+progress in this country that is not constantly discouraged and
+postponed by these Old World tides of ignorance and vice.
+
+[Illustration: BUILDING USED BY THE BRITISH AS A HOSPITAL.]
+
+There can be no doubt that there is a rising tide of public sentiment
+in this country in favor of a careful and wise examination of every
+emigrant who offers himself as a candidate for American citizenship in
+the future. I think, in view of the fact that we are getting a very
+large and increasing proportion of our immigration from Southern
+Europe, which is the most illiterate portion of the Old World--in
+Southern Italy, for instance, seventy-nine out of every one hundred are
+illiterate--there ought to be an educational test. There is certainly
+no wisdom in our adding hundreds of thousands a year to the number of
+illiterates already here, who are unable to read the Declaration of
+Independence, and have not the faintest conception of the principles of
+our Constitution. The examination of emigrants ought to be on the other
+side of the water. We have had many recent illustrations in Boston of
+the manifest hardships experienced under the present arrangement. Every
+person intending to emigrate to America ought to be required to give
+notice of that desire through the nearest American Consul, and furnish
+a clean bill of health, both moral and physical; and no one should be
+permitted to sail without a certificate of such investigation and
+satisfactory finding. This would not shut out any one who would be of
+value to American institutions, but it would require European countries
+to care for the criminals and paupers which their own social system has
+bred.
+
+But what shall we do with these multitudes of foreigners who are
+already living in our midst? In the first place, we must cease to
+regard them as foreigners or aliens, and set to work with a definite
+purpose to Americanize them as quickly as possible. We must not, for a
+moment, be satisfied to let them herd together in the filth and squalor
+to which they may have been accustomed at home. We cannot afford to
+hand them over to the greedy tyranny of the sweater. Nothing will help
+us more than the abolition of the neglected tenement house, and the
+provision for a healthier, cleaner shelter for the people.
+
+[Illustration: VICTORIA SQUARE.]
+
+Some of our public-spirited men of wealth cannot do better than to look
+in this direction as a field in which to make their mark upon the
+uplift of their race and their time. There is a far greater demand for
+this class of benevolent investments than there is for added colleges
+or universities. If some of the vile and unhealthy tenements that have
+been described recently, not only by myself but by the reporters and
+the daily press, could be replaced by such buildings as the Victoria
+Square building in Liverpool, it would be a great public benefaction.
+On the former site of Victoria Square were miserable tenement houses.
+To-day a magnificent structure stands there, built around a hollow
+square, the larger portion of which is given up for a healthful
+play-ground for the children. "The halls and stairways of the building
+are broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements,
+perfect. The apartments are divided into one, two, and three rooms
+each. No room is smaller than thirteen by eight feet six inches; most
+of them are twelve by thirteen feet four inches.
+
+"All the ceilings are nine feet high. A superintendent looks after the
+building. The tenants are expected to be orderly, and keep their
+apartments clean. The roomy character of halls and chambers may be
+inferred from the fact that there are only two hundred and seventy-five
+apartments in the entire building. The returns on the total expenditure
+on the building, which was three hundred and thirty-eight thousand
+eight hundred dollars, it is estimated will be at least four and a half
+per cent." The rents will seem miraculous to those of you who have been
+following the prices given in this series of discourses. In this
+beautiful Victoria Square dwelling, with its large, shrub-encircled
+play-ground for children attached, light, airy, three-room tenements
+are furnished for one dollar and forty-four cents per week. For those
+containing two large rooms one dollar and eight cents a week is
+charged; while the one-room quarters are let at fifty-four cents a
+week.
+
+Who among our rich men will lead off in some grand crusade of this
+sort? Another thing we want to do to Americanize these people, is to
+furnish them employment under conditions consistent with health,
+intelligence, and morality. Instead of the crowded sweat-shop, the
+moral atmosphere of which is as filthy as the physical, we must have
+factories conducted in the spirit of Christian civilization.
+
+Let me tell you of a vision I had the other day as I sat meditating and
+dreaming in my study chair. I dreamed I was walking down the streets of
+an American city when I saw a large brick building which I might have
+thought was a factory except that there were white curtains at every
+window in the house. As I neared the door, I asked a passer-by what it
+was, and he astonished me by saying, "This is the great Christian
+factory." Being a little anxious to see what life in a really Christian
+factory would be like, I went in on a tour of investigation. There were
+several hundred employees in the factory, most of whom were young
+women. To my astonishment, I found bath-tubs in this factory, with an
+abundance of hot and cold water, linen towels, and toilet soap. Did one
+ever hear of such luxuries in a factory of any sort? In the girls'
+bath-room there were rugs under foot, the finishing was done in oak,
+the trimmings were nickel-plated, the sanitary arrangements were
+perfect, and everything was as bright and clean as it was possible to
+make it. Each employee was allowed thirty minutes for a bath, and if
+one was so fastidious as to need three-quarters of an hour, no comments
+were made. The structure was commodious and convenient, substantially
+built, and heated, lighted, and ventilated throughout according to the
+most improved system. Even the cellar was attractive in its
+completeness, from the steam-engine that operated the machinery of the
+building, to the culinary department where those who desired could
+purchase a noon-day lunch at actual cost of material. The cook in
+charge of the kitchen devoted her entire time to the work. Every day,
+tea, with milk and sugar, was supplied by the firm free of charge;
+oaten meal was furnished three days in the week at the same rate.
+Delicious soup was served at three cents a bowl. The entire floor was
+carefully cemented; it was light, warm, and clean, and there were
+tables and benches for those who lunched in the building. An hour was
+allowed at noon, and while all were expected to be on hand promptly at
+one o'clock, the girls living at a distance from the factory were
+thoughtfully permitted to leave a few minutes before twelve o'clock.
+
+On the main floor goods were stored in the centre of the room, the
+remaining space being reserved for the pleasure and convenience of the
+employees. At one end of this spacious floor there was an improvised
+music-room, with a piano and window garden, where the girls could sing
+and sun themselves every noon. Opposite was an enclosed sanctum,
+divided into a reading and reception-room. Bright, soft rugs were
+scattered about. The reading-table was as well stocked with current
+literature as a club man's library table. The papers and periodicals
+were reserved for the exclusive use of the girls. An open fireplace was
+one of the attractive features of the reception-room, and there was a
+mantel-mirror, too--that means of grace so dear to the gentler sex.
+
+The two upper floors contained the work-tables and machines. On
+entering these work-rooms one was struck by the neatness of the place.
+Everything seemed to have a white lining. The atmosphere was not only
+clean, but fresh and sweet. There were no rags, no dust, no fluff, no
+smell of dripping grease from over-hanging machinery. A special staff
+of men was constantly employed to look after the premises, and their
+vigilance was such as to anticipate the wear and tear. The abundance of
+light and sunshine would astonish and delight not only business people,
+but school commissioners as well. Each work-shop was the size of an
+entire floor, so that light was admitted from four sides of the
+building, the windows almost adjoining one another. The white curtains,
+which softened the light, gave the place a homelike appearance which
+was very pleasing. Another charm was the love of flowers. There were
+potted plants on every floor, and they were as green and lovely as if
+nourished by a practical florist. On making some inquiries, I found
+that Friday was pay-day, and that indirectly much good resulted from
+this thoughtful system. Not only did it give the hundreds of families
+the benefit of the early Saturday markets, but in a great measure did
+away with the credit-books, and, best of all, was instrumental in
+keeping the girls off the street Saturday night. No charges were
+imposed upon the operators. They did not have to buy thread, pay
+machine-rent, or replace broken needles. If an attachment was
+displaced, it was restored by the firm, and even the girls' scissors
+were kept sharpened at the expense of the employer. Hot and cold water,
+mirrors, towels, and soap were among the conveniences. Posted over the
+stationary wash basins was this request: "Please help with your
+forethought to keep things clean and nice. Any attention will oblige."
+This was signed by the firm. The work was so systematized, and the
+training so thorough, that the tyrannical forewoman and domineering
+foreman had no place in the establishment. The manager was the only
+person to whom the hands were accountable. Adjoining the factory was a
+pretty garden containing a pear-orchard, with arbors and seats, where
+the girls lunched in fine weather. Women as a class show the effects of
+good keeping, and these workers were not an exception. There were a
+great many pretty faces among them, and not one that betrayed
+"boss-fright" or time-terror. As a class they looked more like normal
+college students than factory hands. Compared with overworked,
+nerve-strained, anxious-faced girls in the sweat-shops, and indeed in
+most shops and factories, these trim, tidy-looking, cheerful and
+contented women seemed to me the very _noblesse_ of the industrial
+world.
+
+Ah! you may say, that is only an idle and visionary dream; and no doubt
+my critic of a few weeks ago, who thought I belonged to the most
+dangerous class in the community when I was describing the misery of
+the "white slaves of the Boston sweaters," would be ready to say that I
+am engaged in a scarcely less dangerous task in putting such ideal and
+impossible dreams into the heads of working-girls. But, dear sceptical
+friend, what I have been telling you is not a dream at all, but a
+heavenly reality that is going on in this modern work-a-day world, in
+the city of Newark, N. J., and I have merely been summarizing for you
+the report of Nell Nelson in the New York _World_, giving an account of
+the Christian experiment of Ferris Brothers' factory for the making of
+corset waists. I was at this point in my discourse on Thursday at
+half-past one o'clock, when I said to myself, "Isn't it a little
+hazardous to take all this for fact, even on the authority of a
+newspaper reporter? Will not a great many of your audience say it is
+only a pleasing fancy of a reporter's imagination?" So at three o'clock
+I was on the train for New York, and at eleven that evening I was in
+bed in a hotel in Newark.
+
+Friday morning, at half-past seven, I was going through Ferris
+Brothers' factory, It is with great pleasure that I tell you that, on
+returning, I did not have to strike out a single word I had written. On
+every side were evidences of thoughtfulness; for instance, a large
+portion of the girls employed live in a section of the city to the rear
+of the factory. In order to save the extra walk of a block or two,
+three hundred additional keys have been made to the orchard gate, so
+that they can come and go that way. A large number of umbrellas are
+kept in the office. If a girl is caught at the factory in an unexpected
+shower, she finds an umbrella waiting to be loaned in just such an
+emergency.
+
+With the manager I went through the culinary department. They make
+ice-cream now every day, and sell large plates to the girls for three
+cents. A careful account is kept of the cost, and the manager said he
+thought he should be able to reduce the cream to two cents a plate.  I
+looked through the reading-room and over the carefully selected lists
+of papers. The manager said that among the girls were some excellent
+musicians, and others with good literary abilities, and told me, I
+thought with a pardonable degree of pride, that a few months since,
+when some desirable positions in the Newark Public Library were open to
+competition, the two young ladies from the Ferris Brothers' factory who
+were successful, scored ninety-five points out of a possible hundred in
+their literary examination. No employee works more than nine and
+one-quarter hours a day, and Saturday afternoon is free. The average
+wages, including beginners and help girls, is seven dollars a week, and
+a good worker makes twelve dollars.
+
+You may say that many of these things that I have mentioned are
+insignificant and only trifles, but, after all, it is such things as
+these that in a large degree make or unmake our human lives; and a
+human life is no trifle. But lest some hard-headed business man shall
+shake his head and say, "The fools will bankrupt themselves," I must
+add, that aside from the beauty and grace of this thoughtful business
+philanthropy, the enterprise has been entirely satisfactory from a
+commercial stand-point, the firm agreeing that not only have their
+employees done more, but better, work than ever before. One of the firm
+assured me that, while there were, of course, many discouraging things
+and occasionally an employee who showed little appreciation, on the
+whole there had been a steady improvement during their three years'
+experience in this factory, and under no circumstances would they be
+willing to go back to the old factory _regime_.
+
+To contrast a factory like this with some of the sweat-shops I have
+visited, is like contrasting heaven with hell. There may be, and I
+doubt not are, many other factories where the same Christian
+thoughtfulness is exercised in the treatment of employees, as here.
+Upon all such may the benediction of Heaven rest! May their numbers be
+multiplied!
+
+The Church, too--I mean the great Catholic Church, formed of all the
+branches of our Christianity "who love the Lord Jesus Christ in
+sincerity"--must open its arms with a heartier tone of welcome and
+brotherhood to the tried and disheartened working-people. Nothing in
+recent art has stirred me so deeply as a dim copy of Hacker's "Christ
+and the Magdalene," reproduced by Mr. Stead in the _Review of Reviews_.
+The Christ is standing with coarse clothing and toil-worn hands by the
+work-bench in the carpenter-shop at Nazareth. The shavings are heaped
+in piles around, him on the otherwise bare floor, while kneeling at his
+feet in penitence and trust is the Magdalene. Brothers, it is this
+carpenter Christ, as Frances Willard aptly puts it, "the Monday
+Christ," for whom the toil-worn world hungers, and will welcome when it
+sees Him manifested in us, in the shop, the factory, and the
+counting-room, as well as in the church.
+
+Zoe Dana Underhill sings, in _Harper's Magazine_, a song the modern
+Church needs to learn, until its great heart shall throb with its
+spirit.
+
+  "The Master called to His reapers,
+    'Make scythe and sickle keen,
+  And bring me the grain from the uplands,
+    And the grass from the meadows green,
+  And from off the mist-clad marshes,
+    Where the salt waves fret and foam,
+  Ye shall gather the rustling sedges,
+    To furnish the harvest-home.
+
+  Then the laborers cried, 'O Master,
+    We will bring Thee the yellow grain
+  That waves on the windy hillside,
+    And the tender grass from the plain;
+  But that which springs on the marshes
+    Is dry and harsh and thin,
+  Unlike the sweet field-grasses,
+    So we will not gather it in.'
+
+  But the Master said, 'O foolish!
+    For many a weary day,
+  Through storm and drought, ye have labored
+    For the grain and the fragrant hay.
+  The generous earth is fruitful,
+    And breezes of summer blow
+  Where these, in the sun and the dews of heaven,
+    Have ripened soft and slow.
+
+  'But out on the wide, bleak marshland
+    Hath never a plough been set,
+  And with rapine and rage of hungry waves
+    The shivering soil is wet.
+  There flower the pale green sedges,
+    And the tides that ebb and flow,
+  And the biting breath of the sea-wind
+    Are the only care they know.
+
+  'They have drunken of bitter waters,
+    Their food hath been sharp sea-sand;
+  And yet they have yielded a harvest
+    Unto the Master's hand.
+  So shall ye all, O reapers,
+    Honor them now the more,
+  And garner in gladness, with songs of praise,
+    The grass from the desolate shore.'"
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, THE BOSTON PAUPERS.
+
+
+  "And Sir Launfal said, 'I behold in thee,
+  An image of Him who died on the tree;
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me;
+  Behold, through Him, I give to thee!'"
+
+--James Russell Lowell: _Sir Launfal_.
+
+
+"Now there was a certain rich man and he was clothed in purple and fine
+linen, faring sumptuously every day: and a certain beggar named Lazarus
+was laid at his gate full of sores."
+
+"Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least,
+ye did it unto Me."
+
+These two views of poverty ever stand over against each other. They are
+the same to-day as when so graphically described by Jesus of Nazareth.
+The one looks on poverty with contempt; it is the view of selfishness.
+The other looks upon it with sympathetic brotherhood; the view of
+humanity at its highest attainment, or from the standpoint of Jesus
+Christ. Both these scriptures, however, agree in teaching us the
+solemnity of our relation to our neighbors who are in trouble or
+poverty. Mrs. Catherwood, in her story of "The Lady of Fort St. John,"
+in the August _Atlantic Monthly_--a tale of the early French
+settlements in this country, illustrates one of the old superstitions
+by a weird tale of an old Hollander who had married a very young wife
+who, when he came to die, was still only a girl; and the cunning old
+Dutchman endeavored to maintain his supremacy over her after his death
+by grimly providing in his will that his right hand should be severed
+from his body, and, preserved by some rare chemical process, should
+always remain in the possession of his widow as her most sacred
+treasure; for if she lost or destroyed it, or failed to look on it once
+a month, nameless and weird calamities, foreseen by the dying man, must
+light not only on her, but on those who loved her best. And so, long
+after he was in his grave, that horrible memento of the past held this
+poor woman in the clasp of its skeleton fingers, and guided her course
+across the oceans, and into distant lands. This was the grip of a
+superstition only; but there is a real grip of the "dead hand," of
+which this ghostly story is only a faint intimation--the grip of
+yesterday on to-day--of to-day on to-morrow--the grip of my duty toward
+my neighbor that cannot be shaken off, which even death itself does not
+loosen.
+
+There is, perhaps, no keener test of the standing of a person or a city
+in the scale of civilization, than their treatment of the sick or
+helpless poor dependent upon them. Dives, the barbarian, whether in
+Jerusalem two thousand years ago, or in Boston to-day, lets the poor
+lie at his gate in indifference, at the mercy of every scavenger that
+may prey upon them. The "Good Samaritan," whether on the road to
+Jericho, or at Rainsford Island, stops with sympathetic eye, a helpful
+hand, and open purse to share his best with the victim of misfortune or
+wrong.
+
+We come this morning to examine into the attitude of Boston toward her
+paupers who are cared for in the two institutions at Long Island and
+Rainsford Island. I have made repeated visits to these islands, and
+approach this discussion only after many weeks of reflection, and a
+careful sifting of the information received. I have hesitated about
+treating the subject at all, because a criticism of a public
+institution is supposed by so many people to mean a personal accusation
+or attack upon the parties in charge of it. I wish to say, in the
+beginning, that so far as I have been able to see, the officers
+immediately in charge of these institutions are kind-hearted and
+humane, and are endeavoring to do the best they can, with the means at
+their disposal. After saying that, I propose, without any regard as to
+whom it may please or displease, to point out candidly what seems to me
+inexcusable thoughtlessness and grievous errors in the treatment of the
+paupers in these institutions.
+
+The largest and best building is on Long Island. Here the men are kept.
+There are about three hundred on the average, but this is increased to
+between four and five hundred in the winter. And right here is a wrong
+that ought to be righted.
+
+[Illustration: TRAMPS.]
+
+The excuse for careless and indifferent treatment of the really
+deserving pauper men who are on Long Island is that every winter the
+place is crowded with "bummers" who come to Long Island in the winter
+for free quarters, and as soon as the weather is fine for out-door
+tramping in the summer, they go away to escape work in the institution,
+coming back again in cold weather, It would certainly be very easy to
+devise a law to make this impossible. No able-bodied person who is able
+to work, ought under any circumstances to be sent to the almshouse.
+People who are able to work and support themselves, and do not do so
+under their own direction, ought to be sent to the work-house, and
+compelled to do so under the direction of a proper officer. This would
+take away from Long Island a lot of drunken tramps who congregate there
+in the winter. The same remark applies to women. The intemperate and
+vicious woman ought not to be sent to the almshouse; it should be
+sacredly kept as "a refuge and a home where the respectable poor, the
+sick, and the old--those who have outlived their children, or have
+broken down in the race of life--may find shelter and care." But the
+honest cases ought not, and need not, suffer in order to punish these
+frauds. At Long Island, on one of my visits, there were ninety-two men
+on the sick-roll, and only one nurse, and he not a trained nurse. I am
+also satisfied that the food is insufficient either for sick or well. A
+reporter of the Boston _Post_ managed to interrogate an old man who was
+able to sit up by the side of his little cot. In answer to a question,
+this sick old man said they did not get any milk; and yet there is a
+large farm attached to the institution, and there is no excuse for not
+having plenty of milk provided at very little expense for these infirm
+old people. The old man said they had meat three times a week--remember
+that means three meals out of twenty-one; and when asked by the
+reporter, "What kind of meat?" he answered pathetically, "It wouldn't
+do any good for me to tell you, sir, but it's mighty poor stuff."
+Permit me to quote in full a little article in the Boston _Herald_ of a
+few weeks since, under the title, "Some Harbor Policemen Overpowered by
+Long Island Hospitality:"--
+
+"There is a little joke which is causing considerable merriment at the
+Harbor police station at the present time, and the key to it is
+contained in the words, 'Long Island hospitality.' A few days ago the
+police-boat 'Protector' was ordered to take to Long Island a party of
+surveyors, who were to lay out grounds for the proposed new hospital.
+
+"The work of the boat's passengers occupied an unexpectedly long time,
+and as no provision had been made for dinner, the party invoked the
+hospitality of the almshouse on the island. The surveyors and officers
+of the boat were assigned to one part of the institution, while the
+crew were invited into the large dining-hall, usually occupied by the
+inmates. It is this last-named party which is bearing the brunt of the
+joke. The feast of which they were invited to partake consisted of a
+lot of potatoes with their jackets on, without the formality of a
+platter, a plate of what the boys termed 'soup-meat,' a soup-dish minus
+the soup, knives and forks, and empty mugs. Grace was omitted; the men
+spent the time in gazing first at the 'feast,' and then at each other.
+A common thought seemed to occupy the minds of all, for without a word
+they simultaneously arose from the table and left the room.
+
+"They waited at the boat until the surveyors' work had been completed,
+and then came back to Boston. It was then time to make the regular
+afternoon trip, and with empty stomachs they started out again and
+finished the day. It was the intention of the victims to keep the
+matter 'shady;' but the joke leaked out, as such things will, and it is
+worse than shaking a red rag at a bull to say 'Long Island hospitality'
+to certain blue-coats who labor on the water." And yet they were there
+at one of the three lucky meals out of twenty-one, when there was
+"soup-meat."
+
+Among the men in this institution was pointed out to me a
+marble-cutter, who was a thoroughly respectable, self-supporting
+workman. He was hurt while at work by the falling of a stone, and so
+disabled by an injury of the spine that he was unable to continue
+employment. As soon as sickness had used up what money he had, having
+no relatives who could help him, there was nothing left for him but to
+come here. One of the officers spoke of him in the highest terms, and
+told me how, without direction from any one else, he sought by many
+daily circuits of the building to strengthen his spine. I was assured
+by the same officer that many others who were inmates were there purely
+through misfortune which was from no fault of their own, but from such
+accidents as are likely to happen to any honest laboring-man. Now I
+maintain that such men ought to be treated with a decent regard for
+their self-respect, and given a comfortable home. It is an outrage that
+this marble-cutter, and others like him, are fed more shabbily than if
+they had been convicted of a crime.
+
+In addition to the men on Long Island, there is one ward in the
+hospital used for women. There were fifty-two sick women crowded into
+this ward at the time of my visit. There was only one nurse, an
+excellent woman, but with no special education for her duties. The
+night helper is a woman who is hired for fifty cents a day. For this
+ward of fifty-two sick women there was no bath-room at all. The nurse's
+own room was situated at the other end of the building from her ward,
+and she had to go across the men's ward to get to her patients at
+night, if she went. There was no place for insane or refractory
+patients, or for the dying, except in the general ward. Sometimes
+their cries and groans are very distressing to the other patients. In a
+recent case of death from mania, the whole ward was disturbed for
+several nights.
+
+Most of the women are kept at Rainsford Island, and there are many more
+reasons for criticism there than on Long Island. The only hospital
+there is an old smallpox hospital, more than three-score years old.
+This is crowded beyond all thought of the requirements of sanitary
+science. Think of a room for confinement cases only seven feet wide and
+less than twelve feet long. In the annual report of Public Institutions
+for 1889 we find the following statement by the then resident
+physician: "It is remarkable that a building which was a small-pox
+hospital fifty-seven years ago, and which since then has undergone no
+material improvement, should up to the present time be the only
+hospital connected with our pauper institutions." The doctor might have
+added that this building was abandoned a quarter of a century ago by
+the State, as unfit for sick persons. It is certainly no extravagance
+to say that these arrangements for the care of the sick on Rainsford
+Island are more than half a century behind the times. The only thing
+modern I saw was the keen-eyed physician.
+
+There is about the entire institution a lack of careful thoughtfulness
+for the comfort of the inmates, that is exceedingly painful to a
+thoughtful observer. For example, the island is very beautifully
+situated, and there are many fine trees in the shade of which, with
+comfortable arrangements, it would be a most healthful and delightful
+experience for hundreds of these infirm and aged women to sit on summer
+days; but, although I searched carefully throughout the grounds, I
+found only two benches under the trees anywhere, and a half-dozen more,
+perhaps, around on the sea-front, and not one of them with a back to
+it. Think of arranging for the comfort of your own grandmother, eighty
+years old, in that way!
+
+The food here, too, is insufficient. For instance, the matron told me
+that only those who worked were allowed butter on their bread. These
+old women are set down to bread and tea for one meal, and bread and
+soup for another; they, too, have a little meat of some kind three
+times a week, and potatoes at dinner. Again I repeat that, with the
+large farm attached to Long Island, there is no reason why these old
+women, as well as the old men, should not have an abundant quantity and
+an appetizing variety of vegetables, as well as plenty of nourishing
+milk. And I maintain that it is a shame and disgrace that the Boston
+which less than five years ago could spend more than twenty thousand
+dollars in feasting and wining a Hawaiian woman who came to visit us,
+expending four thousand dollars for flowers alone, cannot afford to
+furnish a little butter to spread on the bread of the helpless old
+women on Rainsford Island, even if they are unable to work. Think of
+the stolid indifference, or thoughtlessness--to hunt for charitable
+words--of an institution having several hundreds of people to care for,
+and yet making no difference in its hospital diet. No matter what the
+disease, it is to eat up to the cast-iron programme, or starve. Who
+that has been ill or has watched anxiously with their own dear ones,
+but has noticed the capriciousness of a sick person's appetite, the
+longing for little delicacies, for just a taste of some rare and
+unusual dish or drink? Such things are not expensive; they only mean
+that somebody shall invest a little genuine sympathy and thoughtfulness
+in the matter. Throughout this entire institution, hospital and all,
+having over four hundred women, there is not a single trained nurse! In
+this day of enlightenment it ought to be a crime for any hospital to be
+carried on without trained nurses. There is no night watchman on the
+whole island, and, after eight o'clock in the evening, nobody who is
+responsible at all. In the main institution on Rainsford Island the
+attic is crowded with beds to such an extent as to make a healthful
+atmosphere impossible.
+
+You must remember that many people here are paupers through no fault of
+their own. Many of them are victims of incurable disease; and, as
+against such cases the Boston hospitals are closed, the almshouse is
+for them the only open door. Public sentiment must be aroused to
+demand, with Florence Nightingale, that "work-house sick shall not be
+work-house inmates, but they shall be poor sick, cared for as sick who
+are to be cured if possible, and treated as becomes a Christian country
+if they cannot be cured." We people who are followers of Him who
+confessed, "The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but
+the Son of man hath not where to lay His head," cannot afford to treat
+people who are, through misfortune, in the same condition to-day as
+though they were some species of criminal, rather than as the hostages
+of our Christ. Perhaps you say these people are not appreciative, are
+not refined, do not have fine feelings--how do you know that? That is
+doubtless true about some of them, but about many of them nothing could
+be more false. People do not lose their powers of appreciation when
+they lose their money, and I doubt not that these people would average,
+in the essential characteristics of manly and womanly character, with
+the same number of people of the same age you could gather from the
+homes along your street. Last Christmas some kind-hearted women went
+down to Rainsford with some gifts for the sick poor. One of them,
+writing about their reception, says: "It was very touching to see the
+happiness our little gifts conferred. The first was a poor old woman,
+more than eighty, nearly blind from cataracts over her eyes. She is
+called 'Welsh Ann' because she is from Wales. My friend told her I had
+been in Wales. She seemed so glad to shake hands with one who had been
+in her own country, and her voice choked with tears as she thanked me
+and took my gift. But she brushed the tears away from her poor
+sightless eyes while my friend repeated to her the Twenty-third Psalm,
+and then at her request knelt and prayed. The apron which I gave her
+has quite a history. A girl who earns her own living, hearing I was
+making these aprons, sent me this one which she bought. It was worked
+across the bottom, and I thought, as poor Ann rubbed her hands over the
+work she could not see, but only touch, how cheered the young lady
+would be when she heard of the joy her gift gave. I was asked to give
+one pretty apron to another Ann--one they called 'Greenland Ann,'
+because she is so very fond of hearing them sing 'From Greenland's icy
+mountains.'" And surely that spirit of the Christ, which is warm enough
+to impel men to dare the frost of "Greenland's icy mountains" in order
+to comfort with His blessed Gospel their Esquimau brother, ought to
+prompt us to deal thoughtfully and tenderly with the dear old soul that
+likes to hear Him sung about on Rainsford Island.
+
+I shall never forget the impression made upon me by Mark Guy Pearse,
+one of the greatest of the English preachers, in his story of how he
+was ordained a preacher. He said: "It was no bishop or presbytery that
+consecrated me, but a saintly Cornish woman, whom we children called
+old Rosie, and who was, indeed, my right reverend mother in God.
+
+"So far as I can recollect, it was always sun-shiny when we visited old
+Rosie, though of course it must have rained sometimes. She had a single
+room in a tiny little cottage squeezed behind the rest. A narrow strip
+led to the door, and there was no room for any window in front, except
+the one right above the door, peering out from under the heavy thatch.
+There is no one to answer if we knock, so we push our fingers through
+the door and lift the wooden latch. My father, who goes with us almost
+every Sunday, has to stoop his head in climbing the narrow stair, and
+of course the little lad of six and his sisters stoop their heads too;
+there are four of the girls and one of me. Rosie welcomes us with her
+beaming smile. She is sitting up in bed, as she has done for eleven
+long years. She is a hundred and five years old, and her hair is snowy
+white, yet there is not a wrinkle on her brow, and her cheeks have the
+rosy brightness from which she gets the familiar name. All her
+relations are gone, and she is now a pauper with only two or three
+shillings a week from the parish.
+
+"We might call her poor and lonely and bedridden, yet she is brimful of
+happiness. The Bible is constantly at her hand, and she is generally
+thanking God for all His mercies. She has lived in the light and love
+of the Saviour since she was eleven years old; and she has gone so long
+and so far in the good way, that now it is as if she were sitting just
+outside the golden gates, crowned with radiant beauty and clothed with
+white raiment, waiting until her Lord shall bid her enter.
+
+"At dear old Rosie's bed we used to have a little service; first a
+chapter read from the Bible, then a hymn--'Rock of Ages' was her
+favorite, sung to 'Rousseau's Dream.' When the prayer was over, old
+Rosie would lay her thin hand on the little lad's curly head, and say
+as she turned her face upward, 'O Lord, bless the little lad! Bless him
+and make him a preacher.' I didn't like that prayer of hers, and I used
+to say to myself, 'I will never be a preacher; I will be a doctor, and
+gallop about the country visiting people.' But one Sunday, after the
+service and her little prayer, she said 'good-by' to us all. 'You won't
+see me any more; so it must be good-by for a long time now, until we
+meet at home.' We wondered what she meant. Two days after, she was
+carried home by God's angels from her lonely room. My little heart was
+like to break at the thought of never seeing her again; and I went out
+by myself to the garden and prayed, 'Please God, I don't care so much,
+after all, if I become a preacher, if it will make dear Rosie any
+happier.'"
+
+It would be better for us that a millstone were hanged about our necks,
+and we were cast into the depths of the sea, than that we should be
+thoughtless or indifferent of one of God's poor, like old Rosie.
+
+Well, you ask, how can it be made better? My answer is that there ought
+to be a radical change in the Board of Control of Public Institutions.
+I do not make any personal fight on the three men now in control. I
+make war on the whole system. As it is now, there are, in and about
+Boston, ten public institutions, occupied by thousands of men and women
+and children, carried on at an expense of nearly six hundred thousand
+dollars, entirely under the control of three commissioners. This is not
+wise. There ought to be a large advisory board made up of distinguished
+citizens. This should be composed of women as well as men. It is
+certainly a very short-sighted and thoughtless arrangement that,
+although there are in these institutions several hundred women and
+children, there is no woman who has any authorized interest in them.
+There is every reason why women should be on the Boards of Control of
+Public Institutions. The editor of the New York _Nation_ says:
+"Whatever improvement there has been in the condition of Bellevue
+Hospital, for example, and of the hospitals of Blackwell's and Hart's
+Islands, during the past twenty years--and it is very great--has, as a
+rule, been due to women's initiative and labors."
+
+The fact is, that everything that concerns health, education, and good
+morals occupies the minds of women more than it does the minds of most
+of their husbands and fathers; and in every department of municipal
+administration, where the conditions of the streets, of the sewers, of
+the hospitals and almshouses, and of the police, are in question, women
+have an equal interest with men, and in order to the public well-being
+and safety, ought to have an equal voice. I am sure that an advisory
+board of leading citizens, on which were three or four level-headed,
+humane women, would work the revolution that is needed in the treatment
+of Boston's paupers. Do not put this question aside. This is Boston's
+question, and you are a part of Boston. As some one sang in the Boston
+_Transcript_ not long ago:--
+
+  "Lazarus lies at your gate!
+    O proud and prosperous city,
+  How long will you let him wait?
+    Listen and look; have pity.
+
+  Dives, oh, cannot you hear,
+    For the music and dance of your high land,
+  The moaning of misery drear
+    That comes from the desolate island?
+
+  Finest of linen you wear;
+    Comrades in luxury you cherish,
+  Sumptuous daily you fare.
+    What of your neighbors who perish?
+
+  When you would heighten your cheer
+    By a contrast that's very dramatic,
+  Fancy what scenes may appear
+    In a certain dim hospital attic.
+
+  Swarming and sweltering, and scant
+    Of air,--foul to soul as to senses,--
+  Where he that is guilty of Want
+    Meets a doom fit for graver offences.
+
+  Worn-out, the pauper nurse sleeps;
+    The sufferer, forsaken, is crying
+  With no one to moisten his lips,--
+    No one to mark that he's dying.
+
+  Who should hear the _catch_ in his breath
+    'Mid the coughs, curses, ravings, resounding
+  Through the ward o'er the bed of his death,
+    From the close-crowded pallets surrounding?
+
+  And picture the scenes, to come
+    Perhaps, of another sorrow
+  Nearer your stately home,--
+    That you will not have to borrow;
+
+ When hushed is all merry din,
+    And your smiling guests have vanished;
+  When your flowers come blooming in,
+    To be glanced at once and banished;
+
+  When vain are all the crafts
+    That Mammon serve, and never
+  Tour costliest, coolest draughts
+    Can quench the fire of your fever;
+
+  When your street is red with tan,
+    And your oft-pulled door-bell muffled,
+  That the peace of a dying man
+    By no faintest sound be ruffled;
+
+  When love, to give you rest,
+    Doth toil with soothings fruitless;
+  And skill has done its best,
+    And the town's best skill is bootless;
+
+  When the chaises leave the place,
+    And the helpless, poor patrician
+  Lies looking up in the face
+    Of only the Great Physician,--
+
+  God grant it with joy may be
+    That you hear, 'What you did toward others
+  Ye have done it unto Me,
+    In the least of those My brothers!'
+
+  Lazarus lies at your gate;
+    Our kindly dear old city,
+  Let him no longer wait;
+    Open the doors of your pity!"
+
+
+
+
+ XI.
+
+COMMENT ON "OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, THE BOSTON PAUPERS".
+
+
+  "There is no caste in blood,
+  Which runneth of one hue, nor caste in tears,
+  Which trickled salt with all."
+
+
+Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln, who has given a large amount of time and
+painstaking interest to the treatment of the paupers, and who deserves
+more credit than any one else for the present hopeful campaign in their
+behalf, writes as follows in the _Boston Transcript_ of August 28:--
+
+"Those of your readers who were kind enough to follow in your columns,
+last winter, the articles for which you courteously made space there
+concerning the poor of Boston, will, I think, be interested to know
+what has since been done for the islands, and why so much controversy
+is aroused by the sermon of Dr. Banks on the paupers.
+
+"Early in the spring two new commissioners were appointed. It was hoped
+that this change in the board would bring about good results, but, in
+point of fact, matters remained much the same. The appropriation for a
+new hospital, though made months ago, was not acted upon until this
+week, when bids for the building were opened."
+
+[Illustration: WOMEN'S HOSPITAL WARD AT LONG ISLAND.]
+[Footnote: This is the best hospital ward on the two islands. Screen
+shown on the right, behind which is a dying woman.]
+
+"On August 5, I had the honor to lay before the commissioners eight
+requests on behalf of the inmates of the island, as follows:--
+
+1. More occupation for the able-bodied.
+
+2. More comfortable chairs for the aged women, who are obliged to rise
+at 5:30 A.M., and are not allowed to lie down without permission.
+
+3. More benches out of doors for the benefit of the inmates.
+
+4. A separate room for the dying (it having been urged by both the
+physician and superintendent that the cries of dying patients often
+disturbed a whole ward for several nights).
+
+5. More privacy for women in bathing (and it will, perhaps, shock your
+readers, as it did the writer, that one of the commissioners affirmed
+and repeated that he did not consider this necessary).
+
+6. Another nurse at Long Island, where Miss O'Brian has charge of
+fifty-two sick women and where there is no bath-room.
+
+7. Another nurse at the Main Institution Building on Rainsford Island,
+where the laundry-matron has charge of forty-two sick women in addition
+to her other duties, and with no assistance except what is given her by
+inmates.
+
+8. A new matron for the hospital. My reason for making this last
+request is that I believe the present matron to be inefficient. She has
+had no previous hospital training to fit her for her duties, and
+certainly the hospital and its patients, when I last saw them, bore
+evidences of neglect. The beds were not clean, and the patients showed
+a lack of personal cleanliness and care. When I first visited the
+hospital the floors were dirty and the closets were unwashed, but there
+has been an improvement in those respects. I was present when dinner
+was served to thirty patients in one ward--or, indeed, to seventy
+inmates of the hospital--and the matron took no charge of the food,
+which was put before the patients in a most uninviting manner--a great
+contrast to the neat wooden trays which are in use at Tewksbury.
+Moreover, I discerned a want of interest in the patients, to which the
+matron herself bore testimony when she said that she never washed a
+wound, and was engaged as a matron--not as a nurse.
+
+"These, then, were the grounds upon which I asked for the appointment
+of another nurse or matron, and fortunately one has applied for the
+position entirely without my knowledge or solicitation. One of the
+commissioners doubted whether a trained hospital emergency nurse could
+be found to go to the islands; but this offer seems to set that
+question at rest, and it is to be hoped her application may be
+considered favorably.
+
+"I also had the honor to lay before the commissioners the report of one
+of my former tenants, who was an inmate of Rainsford Island a little
+more than a year ago.
+
+"She was a young woman who went down there because of a lump in her
+breast, taking her baby with her. But for the baby she would have been
+admitted to the City Hospital: but she did not like to leave her child,
+and her husband, who was absent, was unable to care for it.
+Consequently, she became for the time an inmate of the Rainsford Island
+Hospital.
+
+"She complained first of the indignity of having to strip in the
+presence of others, no screen or curtain being provided as a shelter to
+the necessary bath, which is the first step on entrance to an
+institution.
+
+"During her stay of three weeks she had no towel given to her, and only
+one clean sheet was furnished.
+
+"She was expected to cook all the food for her baby, and to make and
+clean her own bed, although she was partly incapacitated by the lump in
+her breast, which affected one arm.
+
+"The food was very poor and unsatisfactory; and when she complained
+that the porridge was sour, the matron told her if she did not like it
+she could leave it.
+
+"Worse than all, her baby fell ill on a Wednesday; she could obtain no
+medicine for it until Sunday (though she asked for it repeatedly), and
+on Monday the baby died.
+
+"The mother left the institution the next day. She speaks in the
+highest terms of the physician in charge and of the assistant, Miss
+McDonald, at Rainsford Island; but she says the matron never did
+anything for her and was not with her when the baby died; also, that
+the milk and other food ordered for the patients is often not received
+by them. And in this respect her statement is corroborated by the
+remarks of another woman, also my tenant, who was an inmate of Long
+Island when it was first opened for women several years ago. This woman
+told me, with bated breath, that the food was miserable--it was killing
+her; and, indeed, she died soon after, though I think grief hastened
+her end."
+
+[Illustration: GETTING A BREATH OF FRESH AIR.]
+
+"It is because I have seen these people in their own homes that I feel
+such sympathy for them as paupers. They have known the comfort and
+independence of their own surroundings, and if by reason of old age or
+sickness--through no fault of their own--they become paupers, they
+should at least be treated with clue consideration and nursed with all
+tenderness. I am entering no plea for the lazy and idle and intemperate
+class who seek the refuge of an almshouse, and for whom, as Dr. Banks
+says, the work-house is the proper place; but I do say that old or sick
+people, even if paupers, are entitled to the very best care. We do not
+begrudge it to them in our City Hospital or our State almshouse;
+therefore, why is it too much to require it of the city of Boston's
+pauper hospitals?
+
+"No wonder that an attack such as has been made by Dr. Banks meets with
+violent opposition and denial. He is attacking institutions whose
+officials depend for their bread and butter on the positions which they
+fill. But Dr. Banks and I have no 'axe to grind,' and he is only
+stating the truth when he says that the pauper institutions at
+Rainsford Island are overcrowded (so overcrowded that nearly fifty old
+women sleep in a close and stifling attic, under the roof), and that
+the fare, especially for the old and sick, is not what it should be."
+
+The _Boston Herald_ of August 30 begins an exhaustive article, more
+than five columns long, by saying:--
+
+"For some time there has been an earnest and vigorous agitation going
+on regarding the management and condition of Boston's pauper
+institutions at Long and Rainsford Islands. Heretofore this agitation
+has been out of the sight of the general public, with the exception of
+a few letters which have appeared from time to time in the papers;
+consequently, the sermon of Rev. Louis Albert Banks last Sunday on the
+subject came like a revelation to many.
+
+"The _Herald_ had been making a thorough investigation of the charges
+brought, previous to Mr. Banks' utterances, and this has been continued
+up to the present time, in order that the people of Boston may know
+accurately and to the fullest the precise condition of its pauper
+institutions and their inmates. As a result of that investigation, it
+may be boldly said that the criticisms which have been made public do
+not give an adequate idea of the disgraceful condition in which the
+institutions are at present, nor the treatment which the paupers
+receive and under which they exist rather than live.
+
+"This statement is a strong one, but it can be borne out by facts which
+are indisputable."
+
+In the course of this long article, which fully sustains all statements
+set forth in my discourse, the _Herald_ reporter, commenting on the
+crowded condition of the buildings on Rainsford Island, says:--
+
+"It is in the main building at Rainsford that the greatest lack of even
+decent surroundings prevails, and where the condition of the inmates is
+the worst. Here the fault seems to lie not only with the commissioners,
+but with the matrons in charge, for there is no system discernible in
+the housekeeping arrangements whatever. The infirmary is occupied by
+those women who are not able to get about; and the rooms composing that
+part of the building are pleasant and airy of themselves, but they are
+spoiled by their keeping. There is no classification of inmates, and
+old and young are all together, as well as the vicious and the
+unfortunate.
+
+"Another classification which might be made was suggested by the
+presence of two women who were so unfortunate as to be afflicted in
+such a manner that the whole air of the room was contaminated on their
+account. This was through no fault of their own, and they should not be
+made to suffer for it; but it seems hardly fair that all the other
+women should be compelled to breathe the air made foul by their
+presence. Add to this detriment to health and decent living the bad
+sanitary arrangements, and the result is, indeed, open to criticism.
+
+"This building is so old and antiquated that it originally had no place
+provided inside for water-closets and bath-rooms. In putting these in
+they were built directly in the corners of the rooms; and these corners
+were then partitioned off, but for some unknown reason the partitions
+were not continued up to the ceilings, the result being that the
+closets were practically left in the room and a screen put around.
+Owing to the fact that there is no water on the island, it all being
+brought in tanks by steamer, there is not that abundance used in
+flushing out the bowls which otherwise might be the case, and which
+would go so far toward removing the horrible odor which is so prevalent
+in every part of the building. Aside from the discomfort in being
+obliged to smell this odor continually, the danger to the health of the
+inmates is a serious thing.
+
+"Throughout the wards in this building there is considerable
+overcrowding, although not to the extent that is to be seen in another
+part. The beds are all cared for by the women themselves, and
+conversation with the matron showed that there was a regular time for
+changing the bed linen, although that time was not the same in any two
+rooms, and the writer, after continued questioning and asking for
+explanation, failed to discover that there was any regularity whatever
+about it.
+
+"A few beds were taken at random and stripped to see their condition.
+Invariably the sheets were dirty, very dirty; but this was explained by
+one of the inmates who was in charge of this ward by the statement that
+it was time they were changed, according to their usual practice, but
+for some reason, not given, it had not been done this week. On nearly
+all the sheets were plainly seen the marks of dead bed-bugs and other
+vermin, some of it dried on and looking as though it had been there for
+a long time."
+
+[Illustration: ATTIC AT RAINSFORD ISLAND.]
+
+[Footnote: Cut shows one wing. Another crosses it at right angles and
+is partly occupied. Thirty women occupy this room, allowing about 320
+cubic feet of air-space per person. The only ventilation is through
+windows jutting out on the roof, each one being 2 feet 10 inches by 4
+feet 8 inches in size.]
+
+"It is in the attic of the main building, however, that one should go
+to realize some of Dickens' pictures of pauper life, for there is a
+picture here that needs no exaggeration to make it appear on a par with
+those in fiction. In this attic live the older women, and they pass
+their sleeping hours and many of their waking ones under the eaves of
+this old house.
+
+"Throughout this attic the peak is so low that it can be touched by the
+hand of a man of ordinary height while standing, and the roof pitches
+until it comes to within two feet of the floor. Under the caves here
+are placed the beds of these old women, their heads close under the
+roof, and extending in a line down the length of the building.
+
+"The width of this attic is eighteen feet, and its length is that of
+the building; but it is divided up into several apartments. In one of
+these apartments were thirty beds, all occupied at night. The total
+air-space of this room allowed about three hundred and twenty cubic
+feet to each person, where a thousand are considered necessary with
+good ventilation, according to Mr. Commissioner Newell. The only light
+and ventilation that this attic gets is through a few small windows let
+into the roof, not large enough to furnish ventilation for rooms which
+are not overcrowded, and certainly not large enough to purify rooms
+where the air is made foul by being breathed by at least three times
+too many persons.
+
+"Moreover, these old women are required to rise every morning at 5:00
+o'clock, and are compelled to remain up until 8 o'clock in the evening.
+They are not allowed to lie down during the day without a special
+permit from the doctor, as, they say, it would cause disorder. This
+permit lie says he is always willing to grant, but they seldom come for
+it. This seems perfectly natural, as one hardly can expect that the old
+women would take pains to hunt up the doctor every time they wanted to
+take a short nap.
+
+"Not only are they not allowed to lie down for a nap without this
+special permit, but comfortable chairs are not furnished them. By each
+bed is a single ordinary wooden chair of the cheapest kind, and this is
+allotted to the one occupying the bed. Now and then a rocking-chair may
+be seen, but they are few and far between."
+
+[Illustration: MARINERS' HOME.]
+
+"Some time ago a benevolent and kind-hearted lady visiting the island
+was struck with this lack of comfort, and sent to the institution a
+number of rocking-chairs for use in the old women's ward. They arrived
+on July 16, but an active search for them failed to disclose their
+whereabouts. It was plain that the women for whom they were intended
+were not getting the benefit of them, and inquiry was made. Nobody
+seemed to know where they were. Several believed that something of the
+kind had been sent down, but knew nothing more. Finally, after an
+energetic search by Dr. Harkins, the chairs were discovered in a
+store-house, or paint-shop, where they had been put when they lauded on
+the wharf so long ago. Two days later these chairs had been taken out
+and placed in the wards, and there were two hundred women eager for the
+six comfortable rockers.
+
+"Another criticism which might be made is that the paupers are provided
+with no regular religious service. At Deer Island there is a paid
+chaplain, and although his duties do not call him to the almshouse, he
+sometimes goes over. There is a large room called the chapel, and here
+religious services are held when there is any one to lead them. A
+Catholic priest goes down twice a week to minister to the wants of the
+Catholics, who are in the majority; something like ninety-five per cent
+being of that persuasion. The fact remains, however, that the city of
+Boston does not give its paupers the benefit of any religious service
+or guidance. As was said by one lady on hearing the facts: 'In the eyes
+of the city it is a greater crime to be a pauper than a criminal.'"
+
+Rev. Dr. Frederick B. Allen, of the Episcopal City Mission of Boston,
+writing in the Herald of August 31, says:--
+
+"In the management of human beings, especially the aged, the infirm,
+the insane, and the sick, there is needed a wise and tender
+consideration which sheer business management is apt to miss.
+
+"The sociological problems of pauperism and crime, the study of
+successful methods in other cities and other lands, the deep sense of
+the sacredness of our humanity, even in its weakest and most
+unfortunate members,--these make their demand for the aid of men and
+women to whom these questions of human life and death are at least as
+controlling as the reduction of the city tax rate.
+
+"Were there any such board of advisers to do in our city institutions
+what the State Charities Aid Society has done for New York State, we
+should not have been confronted, as we now are, with poorly planned,
+inadequate, and badly managed buildings, lack of discrimination in
+those permitted to occupy them, insufficient and untrained nurses for
+the sick, lack of proper ventilation and food, and everywhere the
+absence of devoted personal, human, moral oversight and control.
+
+"I second most positively Dr. Banks' assertion that 'an advisory board
+of leading citizens, on which are three or four level-headed and humane
+women, would work the revolution that is needed in the treatment of"
+our brothers and sisters, the Boston paupers."'"
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE GOLD GOD OF MODERN SOCIETY.
+
+
+  "When wealth no mere shall rest in mounded heaps.
+  But smit with freer light shall slowly melt
+  In many streams to fatten lower lands,
+  And light shall spread, and man be liker man
+  Thro' all the seasons of the golden year."
+
+No one who is in touch with the throbbing life of this time can fail to
+perceive that this is an age peculiarly given up to the worship of
+Mammon. The literature of our day bears certain evidence of this fact.
+_Scribner's Magazine_ of last year contained, under the title of
+"Jerry," a painfully realistic and comprehensive story, dealing with
+the debauch of a noble character by the fascination of gold. Jerry
+belonged to the "poor white trash" of the Cumberland Mountains, and on
+the death of his mother, being cruelly treated at home, he ran away to
+the West. After many wanderings, the little wayfarer, tired out and
+almost dead, fell into the hands of a quaint old miner who was digging
+and hoarding up gold in his cabin in the Northwestern Mountains. In the
+midst of this wild region, educated by a kind-hearted physician, Jerry
+grew up to be a young man of peculiarly noble and heroic character. He
+remembered with painful distinctness that he belonged to the poorest of
+the common people, and the ambition of his life was to uplift his own
+class.
+
+The fearful tragedy of the story begins when the miserly old
+miner--who, all the time unknown to Jerry, is hoarding up gold for his
+young ward--discovers, to his great astonishment, that gold has no
+fascination for this strange young man, and fears that with his lofty
+ideals all his toil for him will be in vain and unappreciated. So the
+shrewd old man plans to send him to the East, where his eyes may be
+dazzled with the brilliancy of fashionable life, and where may be
+revealed to him the power gold gives to its possessor. Sitting in his
+old log cabin on the mountain side, the old miner would rub his hands
+back on his stubbly gray hair and reason with himself: "If Jerry only
+knew gold; if Jerry could only see what gold could get, could only
+spend gold; then he would be willing to take all he could get and never
+ask where it came from." So the old miner determined that "Jerry must
+learn to spend money, must learn to love it, and then all will go
+well." And then the story goes on to tell of the deterioration of this
+noble young soul--how that gradually he becomes dominated with the
+passion for gold, until he is not only willing to work for it, but
+murder for it, if only he may have gold and the power that it brings.
+
+In another field Mr. Charles Dudley Warner gives us the same warning,
+in his story of "A Little Journey in the World." In this Mr. Warner
+tells us of one of the sweetest and purest of young women, who has the
+highest ideals, and whose standards of morality are of the noblest, who
+is married to an unprincipled young speculator on Wall Street, New
+York; and under the influence of her husband, and the society into
+which she is drawn by his business relations, in which he gathers
+millions of money, all her holy and lofty ideals are overthrown, and
+she becomes simply a material, worldly woman. This is the way he
+reasons about it: "But we, I say, who loved her, and knew so well the
+noble possibilities of her royal nature, under circumstances favorable
+to its development, felt more and more her departure from her own
+ideals. Her life in its spreading prosperity seemed more and more
+shallow. I do not say she was heartless; I do not say she was
+uncharitable; I do not say that in all the externals of worldly and
+religious observance she was wanting; I do not say that the more she
+was assimilated to the serenely worldly nature of her husband, she did
+not love him, or that she was unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed
+her and bore her onward. I do not know that there is anything singular
+in her history. But the pain of it to us was in the certainty--and it
+seemed so near--that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening
+process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interest to
+the trivial and sensuous gratifications--time, mind, heart, ambition,
+all fixed on them--we should never regain our Margaret. What I saw in a
+vision of her future was a _dead soul_--a beautiful woman in all the
+success of envied prosperity, with a dead soul."
+
+[Illustration: CHILDREN PLAYING IN COPP'S HILL BURYING GROUND.]
+
+If we turn away from these revelations of the worm at the heart of our
+social life, that are made fascinating by the art in which they are
+clothed, to the rude happenings of every-day observation, the same
+danger is everywhere apparent. The associated press despatches from San
+Jose, Cal., a few weeks since, bore this burden: "One of the best-known
+men in California died yesterday in a squalid hut on Colfax Street. He
+was Prof. Herman Kottinger, who at one time was the leading violinist
+on the Pacific Coast, and well known as a writer of prose and poetry,
+of 'A World's History,' and also of text-books on free thought. He was
+worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, acquired by a lifetime of
+miserly frugality. At the time of his death sixteen hundred dollars in
+gold coin was found secreted in his bed. But one child, William
+Kottinger, a farmer, was present at the death. When the old man in his
+death-throes raised himself up in bed, the son rushed to his side. His
+father, mistaking the act, with a frenzied yell waved him back, and
+clutching at the bedclothes, pulled them back, disclosing to view the
+gold. He made a grab at it with both hands, and with the bright pieces
+in his fingers fell back with a gasp and expired.
+
+"Prof. Kottinger was once a doctor in Heidelberg University, and was
+ninety years old. He was so wasted by hunger that his body weighed less
+than forty pounds, and was in a disgusting condition. His bed and
+clothes were reeking with filth. Over the head of the bed hung a violin
+of great value. So miserly was the old professor that fifteen years ago
+he drove his wife and all his children from home, saying that it cost
+too much to feed and clothe them. From that day until yesterday, when
+the end was approaching, not one of his relatives had come near him.
+Two big fierce Danish mastiffs, half starved, have for years been the
+old man's only companions, and they guarded the shanty so well that not
+even a tax-collector could approach. They had to be killed yesterday
+before the undertaker could get into the house. When it was learned
+that Kottinger was dead, a number of his relatives hastened to his hut.
+There has been a shameful neglect of the dead shown, and indecent haste
+in ransacking the place in search of the gold and other treasures known
+to be hidden."
+
+All these show the destructive power of gold upon its worshippers. But
+these are by no means the only victims of this worship of the gold god.
+For every one who is hoarding up his millions, and who is dominated by
+the love of gold for its very shine and glitter, there are hundreds and
+thousands who are toiling for insufficient wages, and are suffering in
+poverty and want, that this lordly worshipper may pay his devotions to
+the money god.
+
+[Illustration: DIGGING IN THE ASH-BARRELS IN WINTER.]
+
+If some of these money kings who have made their millions by the
+oppression of the poor, in mines, and mills, and factories, were
+suddenly called to face the bones of the dead who have gone to their
+graves from weary, unrequited slavery, in order for their financial
+triumph, they would stand back aghast at the price of their own
+success.
+
+It is this worship of the gold god which is at the bottom of all the
+wrongs which have been pointed out in this series of discourses. The
+wealthy merchant who pays the poor widow one cent apiece for making
+white aprons, and by his avarice and his lust induces the young women
+who sell them to eke out their scanty wages by the sale of their honor,
+is a worshipper of the gold god. The sweater who parcels out his work
+through the miserable tenement houses, grinding the face of the poor to
+the very last degree possible with physical existence,--indeed, many
+times beyond the possibility of existence, except when helped by
+charity,--is an obsequious devotee at the altar of Mammon. The
+chattel-mortgage shark, who watches all the necessities of the poor as
+anxiously as ever a hawk watched over a helpless or crippled bird, and
+the liquor-seller, who fills his coffers by a traffic which injures and
+destroys the health, the intelligence, and the morality of all the
+people whom he can draw into his net, investing all his cunning in
+methods to entrap the unwary, and gloating over the increasing appetite
+and the devilish passion for strong drink in his victims, are only
+brothers to the others who gather to pay their devotions to the god of
+gold.
+
+[Illustration: FOUR SHINERS.]
+
+If we do not approve these worshippers, what shall we say of ourselves
+for permitting this state of things to come to pass? It is inconsistent
+to condemn the liquor-seller and honor the city which licenses him to
+do his damnable work. It is impossible to condemn the sweater and
+retain your respect for the public which permits him to carry on his
+nefarious business. The spirit of avarice is in the very air, until
+society has been poisoned by its breath. Dr. Howard Crosby, writing in
+the _Forum_ a few years since, says: "The healthiest form of human
+society is where the many are equally independent in their management
+of their affairs, where professions and trades are represented by
+individual thinking minds, and where those engaged in any one branch of
+industry stand on a level with one another. This condition of things
+promotes invention, activity, interest, manliness, and good
+citizenship. Now the gold-hunt system is directly antagonistic to all
+this. It seeks to destroy the many independent tradesmen, and to make
+them servants in a gigantic monopoly. The happy homes of freemen become
+the pinched quarters of serfs. The lords of trade have their hundreds
+and thousands of humble subordinates over whom they rule, often with a
+rod of iron. They may be turned away from work and wages at any moment,
+by any whim of the selfish employer. Hence, through fear of this, they
+lose their manhood, and dare not assert even a decision of their
+conscience. There is no more melancholy sight to my eyes than that
+which I often see nowadays--the former happy possessor of a shop or
+store, who has lived comfortably and with the true nobility of a
+citizen, and whose family have felt the dignity of the home, now made a
+clerk and drudge in a huge establishment that, by its relentless use of
+millions, has undermined and overthrown all the independent stores of a
+large district, while his family are thrust into the unsavory communism
+of a tenement house, and lose all the delicate refinements of a quiet
+home. It is easy to say that this is but the natural law of trade. So
+to devour men is the natural law of tigers. But this truth will not
+reconcile us to the process. If we are to stop men from stealing
+directly, we can stop them from stealing indirectly. If natural law
+works evil to the community, we are to make statute law, which will act
+as supernatural law, and control the offensive principle. Unless we
+wish our social equality destroyed, and a system of practical serfdom
+to take its place, we must put a limit to the acts of greed, and so
+preserve the independence of our citizens."
+
+[Illustration: SOUTH BOSTON RAG-PICKERS.]
+
+Every thoughtful observer of the "signs of the times" knows that the
+deepest problem of our age is the amicable solution of the struggle
+between labor and capital. Some of the ablest work done in literature,
+in our time, has been produced out of an earnest desire to abolish the
+more recent types of this white slavery, which has, in one form or
+another, threatened the masses since the days of old John Ball of early
+England. Perhaps the strongest portrayal, yet, of many phases of the
+question, especially those relating to the city, maybe found in Mr.
+Howells' story, "A Hazard of New Fortunes." For the country, if one
+really wants to see what is behind the great upheaval in the West,
+which has its outward manifestation in the Farmers' Alliance, he only
+needs to read Mr. Hamlin Garland's "Main Travelled Roads."
+
+In the meantime most of us are asking, "What is the way out?" As for
+myself, I confess to being only a student. I have no word of sneer or
+scoff for any mail's honest thinking, who is sincerely trying to uplift
+his brothers and sisters; and yet I must say that, as yet, I have not
+been able to become a disciple of any of the new systems that have been
+presented. I feel something like the man who says, "There are good
+things to be said in praise of Socialism or Nationalism, as compared
+with the crushing and wearing methods of competition; but what the
+world is waiting for is the thinker who shall either show us how to
+reconcile the new system with human liberty, or else convince us that
+we can do without liberty." In the mean-time I believe in God, in His
+wise purpose in the creation of the world, in His providential care
+over it, and that under His grace there shall come the triumph of
+righteousness in it. I believe in Jesus Christ. To my mind,
+Christianity stands to-day very much as it did nearly two thousand
+years ago, when Jesus hung upon the cross between two thieves. The
+anarchy which, atheistic and reckless, would destroy all law and all
+property, is one of the thieves, and the devotee of the gold god of our
+time, who clutches his money-bags and says, "I have a right to get all
+the money I can, and do with it what I please," is the other thief.
+Christianity stands between them; her mission is to change them both,
+and bring them with a regenerated purpose into brotherhood and
+fellowship.
+
+George Macdonald says: "The world will change only as the heart of man
+changes. Growing intellect, growing civilization, will heal man's
+wounds only to cause the deeper ill to break out afresh in new forms,
+nor can they satisfy one longing of the human soul. Its desires are
+deeper than that soul itself, whence it groans with the groanings that
+cannot be uttered. As much in times of civilization as in those of
+barbarity, the soul needs an external presence to make its life good to
+it." The Christianity of to-day must set itself, as did Jesus, to make
+men brothers, by bringing them to a recognition of the fact that they
+are all alike the children of one God and Father over all. Such a
+Christianity will necessarily be at war with the gold god of our time.
+The clear-cut declaration of Jesus, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,"
+is as true now as when He uttered it. I do not remember to have seen
+this issue put as clearly anywhere else as by Henry D. Lloyd in an
+article in the _North American Review_ entitled, "The New Conscience."
+He says: Let us listen while a delegation from the Money-power
+remonstrates with the New Conscience for its unreasonable sentiments
+and ideas. Here they come, one by one, and range themselves about.
+
+First speaks--
+
+THE MERCHANT PRINCE: I have a right to buy where I can buy cheapest.
+
+CONSCIENCE: See these little stunted, hollow-eyed girls coming out of
+that factory.
+
+LAWYER: Wages are settled by contract.
+
+CONSCIENCE: Where can I find white-haired workingmen?
+
+CAPITALIST: Every man has a right to do what he will with his own.
+
+CONSCIENCE: What is the price of a senatorship to-day?
+
+STATISTICIAN: Never were food, fuel, and clothing so cheap.
+
+CONSCIENCE: Little Mary Mitchell works in Waterbury's ropeworks five
+days a week from six in the evening till six in the morning.
+
+RAILROAD KING: Every man makes his own career. I was a workingman
+myself twenty years ago, and now I keep a carriage, a butler, and
+several judges and legislators, in four States, and--
+
+CONSCIENCE: That tired-looking man is a railway conductor of a company
+owned by half a dozen men worth three hundred millions of dollars,
+which is not enough for them, so they squeeze a few more dollars a
+month out of him by making him, on every alternate trip, do
+twenty-eight and a half hours' work without sleep.
+
+BANKER: Our wealth is increasing one billion dollars a year. We have
+boards of trades, the best railroads in the world, and packing-houses
+that can kill ten thousand hogs.
+
+CONSCIENCE: The sickening stench, the blistered air, the foul sights of
+the tenements, and the motherhood and the childhood choking there.
+
+CONSERVATIVE: This is the best government in the world. America is good
+enough for me.
+
+CONSCIENCE: Listen to that "tramp, tramp, tramp" of a million of men
+out of work.
+
+MANUFACTURER: Without this system of industry the subjugation of North
+America to civilization would have been impossible; we could never have
+shown the world the magnificent spectacle of--
+
+CONSCIENCE: There is a little boy standing ten hours a day up to his
+ankles in the water in a coal-mine.
+
+COAL MONOPOLIST: I have a statistician who can prove--he can prove
+anything--that the workingman is a great deal better off than he ever
+was, that he makes more than I do, that small incomes are increasing
+and large ones decreasing, that there is no involuntary poverty, and
+that the workingmen could live on twenty-five cents each a day and buy
+up the United States with their savings, and--
+
+CONSCIENCE: How long shall it be cheaper to run over workingmen and
+women at the railroad crossings in the cities than to put up gates?
+
+CLERGYMAN: The poor we are to have with us always.
+
+CONSCIENCE: That sewing-woman you see pawning her shawl has lived this
+winter with her two children in a room without fire. Are you wearing
+one of the shirts she finished?
+
+STATESMAN: The workingman has the ballot and the newspapers. He is a
+free citizen.
+
+CONSCIENCE: As the nights grow colder see how the number of girls on
+the street increases.
+
+It is this new conscience, the conscience of Jesus Christ, that
+appraises a hungry child to be of more value than ten thousand palaces,
+that must animate and dominate the church that is called by His name,
+in its war against the gold god of modern society.
+
+You may find this conscience throbbing in Ella Wheeler Wilcox's plea
+for "Justice, not Charity."
+
+  "All hail the dawn of a new day breaking,
+    When a strong armed nation shall take away
+  The weary burden from backs that are aching
+    With maximum work and minimum pay.
+
+  When no man is honored who hoards his millions,
+    When no man feasts on another's toil,
+  And God's poor, suffering, starving billions
+    Shall share His riches of sun and soil.
+
+  There is gold for all in the world's broad bosom.
+    There is food for all in the world's great store;
+  Enough is provided if rightly divided,
+    Let each man take what he needs--no more.
+
+  Shame on the miser with unused riches,
+    Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard,
+  Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches,
+    And steals the bread from the poor man's board!
+
+  Shame on the owner of mines whose cruel
+    And selfish measures have brought him wealth!
+  While the ragged wretches who dig his fuel
+    Are robbed of comfort, and hope, and health.
+
+  Shame on the ruler who rides in his carriage,
+    Bought by the labor of half-paid men--
+  Men who are shut out of home and marriage,
+    And are herded like sheep in a hovel pen."
+
+There must be no doubt about the attitude of the church in a time like
+this. Against the gold god and all his oppressions the Christian Church
+must stand with an unflinching front. Our God is the same who spoke
+through the voice of Amos of old, saying, "Hear this, oh ye that
+swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail,
+saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? And the
+sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the
+shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? That we may buy
+the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell
+the refuse of the wheat?" Ah! how much that sounds like the things that
+are going on at the present time! Yet listen to the oath of the
+Almighty as He looks on such things: "The Lord hath sworn by the
+excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works.
+Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that dwelleth
+therein?... And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God,
+that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the
+earth in a clear day: and I will turn your feasts into mourning, and
+all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sack-cloth upon
+all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the
+mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day."
+
+It is the mission of our blessed Christianity to save the world from
+that bitter day by so changing and transforming it that it will no
+longer deserve bitterness, but peace, at the hand of God. Although I
+have felt compelled, in this series of discourses, to uncover many dark
+and loathsome places in our social system, yet I am no pessimist, and I
+do not despair. Jesus Christ, our Captain, saw "Satan fallen as
+lightning from heaven;" and when we are as devoted to God, and as
+thoroughly consecrated to our mission of curing the world's heartache
+as was He, we, too, shall live in sight of the same glorious triumph.
+When we are imbued with this faith, and exalted into fellowship with
+Him, we will not dare to say that the sweatshop, or the neglected
+tenement house, or the noisome liquor saloon, is a necessary contingent
+of human life. And we will know that whatever is good enough to be
+true, may be and shall be true to the sons and daughters of God. In
+that faith we shall be able to sing with the poet:--
+
+  "'Tis coming up the steeps of time,
+    And this old world is growing brighter;
+  We may not see its dawn sublime,
+    Yet high hopes make the heart throb lighter!
+
+  We may be sleeping in the ground,
+    When it awakes the peoples' wonder;
+  But we have felt it gathering round,
+    And heard its voice of living thunder;
+  Christ's reign, ah, yes, 'tis coming!
+
+  Aye, it _must_ come! the Tyrant's throne
+    Is crumbling, with men's hot tears rusted;
+  The sword earth's mighty have leant upon
+    Is cankered, with men's hearts' blood crusted!
+
+  Room! for the man of love make way!
+    Ye selfish great ones, pause no longer;
+  Ye cannot stay the opening day,
+    The world rolls on, the light grows stronger--
+  The Master's advent's coming!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of White Slaves, by Louis A Banks
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE SLAVES ***
+
+This file should be named 6802.txt or 6802.zip
+
+Produced by Steve Schulze, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+This file was produced from images generously made available by the
+CWRU Preservation Department Digital Library
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/6802.zip b/6802.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3543eef
--- /dev/null
+++ b/6802.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b61d879
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #6802 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6802)