Part 8 (1/2)

This evil, like all evils that arise from the compet.i.tive system, is not incidental or occasional, but inherent and necessary. It cannot be better stated than by Miss Woodbridge, the secretary of the Working Women's Society, in a report made to the Society on May 6, 1890:

”It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but woman's wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her. The very fact that some of these women receive partial support from brothers or fathers and are thus enabled to live upon less than they earn, forces other women who have no such support either to suffer for necessities or seek other means of support.”

The extent to which wages are reduced below starvation rates is also stated as follows:

”The wages, which are low, we find are often reduced by excessive fines, the employers placing a value upon time lost that is not given to service rendered. The salaries of saleswomen range from $2.00 to $18.00, but the latter sum is only paid in rare instances in cloak and suit departments. The average salary in the best houses does not exceed $7.00, and averages $4.00 or $4.50 per week. Cas.h.i.+ers receive from $6.00 to $15.00, averaging about $9.00. Cash girls receive from $1.50 to $2.50 per week, though we know of but one store where $2.50 is paid. In the Broadway stores boys are employed, usually on commission. The average salary of one large shop for saleswomen and cash girls is $2.40; another $2.90; another $3.10; but in the latter, the employees are nearly all men and boys. We find in many stores the rule to fine from five to thirty cents for a few minutes' tardiness.

In one store all women who earn over $7.00 are fined thirty cents for ten minutes' tardiness. Cash girls who earn $1.75 per week are fined ten cents for ten minutes' tardiness.”

It is hardly necessary to comment on a wage to saleswomen varying from $2.40 to $3.10 a week, and this liable to reduction by fines. It will be observed too that owners of department stores are compelled by the pressure of the market to seek this half-supported help. Miss Woodbridge says:

”In all the stores the tendency is to secure cheap help. You often see the advertis.e.m.e.nt reading thus: 'Young misses, just graduated, wanted for positions as saleswomen;' which means that being girls with homes they can afford to work cheaper than those who are self-supporting.”

The words ”just graduated” const.i.tute a direct appeal to the educated--that is to say, partially supported--women.

So a self-respecting young girl who desires to contribute to the expenses of the home, sets the rate of wages which drives her less fortunate sister to misery and crime, and thus becomes the unconscious instrument of her shame.

If anyone is not satisfied that the conditions above described must result, unsavory details of a kind to persuade him will be found in the report of Miss Maud E. Miner, probation officer of city magistrates' courts, published in the Survey.

Lastly, temptation would be indirectly as well as directly diminished by the absence of prost.i.tutes as a cla.s.s. It has been already intimated that prost.i.tution committed injustice to _both_ s.e.xes. By this it was intended to refer to the injustice of exposing our young men to perpetual temptation furnished by the facilities for prost.i.tution. The whole question of s.e.xual morality is mainly one of suggestion. Take eight men accustomed to believe that they cannot dispense with s.e.xual connection; put them in a crew and remove the suggestion that they can obtain relief at any time by subst.i.tuting therefor the notion of loyalty to the crew or a desire to win a race, and the desire which before seemed uncontrollable practically disappears. The moment the race is over, the old suggestion returns, and the night of a boat race has become proverbial in consequence. The same is true of men who go on hunting expeditions, yachting cruises, into lumber camps, etc. Desire becomes dormant or controllable as soon as facilities for gratifying it disappear; the moment the facility returns, the suggestion is revived, and desire becomes uncontrollable.

What, then, would be the consequence if the suggestion were minimized by the absence of prost.i.tution altogether?

But this is not all: Men who seduce young girls and married women have learned to gratify their pa.s.sions through the facility afforded by prost.i.tution. If our youths were never afforded the chance of taking that first step which leads to the _facilis descensus_, they would, from the fact of never having gratified their pa.s.sions, be less likely to undertake to gratify them at the cost of seduction. The suggestion would be absent; all women would tend to be as sacred to a man as his sister. The relation of brother and sister is due entirely to the absence of suggestion; he has learned to regard her with an unconscious respect which removes the possibility of erotic suggestion. What actually happens in the small family of to-day could also happen in the larger family of to-morrow.

This must not be understood as a contention that Socialism would destroy immorality. Far from it. All that is claimed is that it might diminish immorality and that it would put an end to prost.i.tution. This last is reason enough for it.

It is impossible to treat of the economic cause of prost.i.tution without discussing its ethical consequences, because the consequences react upon the cause. But we are here chiefly concerned with its economic features; and it is impossible to put too much emphasis upon the fact that the greatest permanent blot upon our civilization is the necessary result of a compet.i.tive system that leaves a large part of our women no other means of livelihood.

Although we have carefully distinguished between the woman who sells herself to one man for a fortune and the common prost.i.tute who sells herself to many men for a pittance, the first is often more to blame than the latter, because the latter is compelled by hunger while the former often barters her chast.i.ty out of sheer love of luxury. The whole heredity of man may be altered by the elimination through Socialism of the sordid motive for marriage. Avarice may become diminished by s.e.xual selection. For although s.e.xual selection is not to-day found to have the force in animal heredity that Darwin thought, it is an important factor in human heredity, thanks to the opportunity for deliberate selection furnished by our inst.i.tution of marriage. But this belongs to another chapter.

From a purely economic point of view, prost.i.tution is to be cla.s.sed with unemployment, which burdens the community with the support of a cla.s.s that in a cooperative commonwealth would be self-supporting. It seems hardly necessary to state that the dissipation that attends the life of a prost.i.tute unfits her for work. And not content with being idle herself, she causes others to be idle and const.i.tutes a permanent source of contagion, moral and physical, in our midst.

This is a necessary consequence of the compet.i.tive system.

-- 4. STRIKES AND LOCKOUTS

Another necessary result of a system of production that sets the man who works with his hands against the man who works with his head, is the conflict between capital and labor, that expresses itself in strikes and lockouts. The conflict itself is treated in detail in the chapter ent.i.tled Trusts and Trade Unions. Here we shall confine ourselves to its wastefulness in time and money.

The sixteenth Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor,[53] for 1901, estimates the loss to employees resulting from strikes and lockouts from January 1, 1881, to December 1, 1900--a period of twenty years--at $306,683,223, and the loss to employers during the same time at $142,659,104--together $449,342,327; or roughly--$450,000,000. It is interesting to note how much less is the loss to employers who are relatively able to bear it than to employees who are relatively unable to bear it. But without regard to the injustice of a system that bears so hardly upon the workingman, no practical American who desires to see production attended with the least waste and friction, can look upon such a loss as this without impatience and humiliation.

Quite irrespective of the misery that results from unemployment and the evils that attend it for the whole community--employed as well as unemployed--too much emphasis cannot be put upon the foolish waste of human energy that unemployment occasions. There have been for two years in this country over a million (and probably much more than a million) able-bodied men willing and anxious to a.s.sist in the production and distribution of the things we need, and who have not been permitted to do so--the energy of over a million, and probably a great many more, absolutely wasted.

I have been amazed at the indifference of our wealthy cla.s.s, and even of the philanthropists amongst our wealthy cla.s.s, at this condition of the unemployed until a clue to this indifference was furnished by the navete of a few of our captains of industry.

Here is what one of them, Daniel Guggenheim, president of the American Smelting and Refining Company, says to the _Wall Street Journal_, August 10:

”Every manufacturer in the country has lowered his costs of production, partly through cheaper prices for raw materials, but princ.i.p.ally on account of the increased efficiency of labor. The latter is one of the redeeming features of the current depression.

”For the first time in many years the employer is getting from his men the 100 per cent in efficiency for which he pays. It is a safe a.s.sertion that prior to the panic the efficiency of labor was no higher than 75 per cent, perhaps not even that.