White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor Part 5

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 a.s.sist 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d 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 suns.h.i.+ne and pure air. It was an individual cabin, occupied by Uncle Tom's family alone.

The climate was suns.h.i.+ny; 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 suns.h.i.+ny 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 suns.h.i.+ne and pure air.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CELLARWAY LEADING TO UNDERGROUND APARTMENTS.]

Modern science is imperative in its urgent emphasis on the influence of light and suns.h.i.+ne 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 pa.s.sage, 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 part.i.tion. 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 gla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed threescore. Their locks are white, and they are no longer able to work as hard as formerly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. n.o.body could keep it clean. There is no suns.h.i.+ne, 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sures 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-s.p.a.ce or side yard. A stable for two horses comes out of this s.p.a.ce; 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 finis.h.i.+ng pants at ten cents a pair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 s.p.a.cious, 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs are not worth five dollars. The cupboard is a lemon-box with a part.i.tion 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: c.o.c.kROACHES BY FLASH-LIGHT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BANANA SELLER.]

On some of the walls of these living rooms the c.o.c.kroaches 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied with regarding whitewas.h.i.+ng, 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.