Part 5 (1/2)
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.]