"Employers are doing it all the time, and the rich employers are the worst. I suppose that is one reason why they are rich! But if they did not generally keep their rates of payment down to the minimum they can get men and women to take, there could not be such hard, grinding poverty. The truth is, a large proportion of our laboring classes are always living next door to starvation, and if sickness or want of work comes, it is next door no longer!"
"That seems very strange to me," said Miss Blanchard, thoughtfully. "I have lived all my life in Rockland, a quiet little place among the hills;—where everybody knows everybody else, and where our one or two employers think it their duty to know all the circumstances of all their workers, and are always ready to help them on, and to tide them over a difficulty."
"Yes, that's beautiful!" said Roland. "I know there are such noble exceptions—and they are especially likely to occur in small places, where the fierce tide of competition for wealth and luxury isn't so irresistible, and people seem to have some humanity left! Here, in Minton, where I haven't been so very long, I know numbers of cases where people are living on what I call starvation wages—especially women. You see, operatives are so apt to leave everything to selfish managers, whose main object is to please the firm, and these managers are often guilty of positive inhumanity. There now," he said, as they passed a large building gleaming with long rows of lighted windows, from whose entrance a stream of young women was pouring forth; "there's a place where too many things are done, contrary to all sound principles of justice and humanity. The operatives are made simply working-machines, obliged to work more hours than any young woman should be allowed to do; miserably paid, and exposed to petty tyrannies enough to take out of their life any little comfort they might have in it."
"Whose place is it?" she asked.
"Pomeroy & Company's silk and woolen mills."
"Why, I know young Mr. Pomeroy very well!" exclaimed Miss Blanchard; "and his mother, Mrs. Pomeroy, is a very good woman! I'm sure they can't know about such things!"
"They probably then don't try to know," he replied. "That's the great trouble. The heads of such places are so fully occupied with the business part of their concerns, that they have no time to think of the people by whom the business is made."
As they passed the building, they came up with two of the girls who were standing engrossed in earnest conversation.
"Don't go, Nelly!" they heard one say to the other. "It won't come to no good, any way, and Jim would be that vexed, if he knew!"
"Oh, I guess he'd live to get over it," laughed the other. "Don't you bother about it, Liz!" And she turned toward them, as they passed, a pretty, pert face, beneath a mass of elaborately frizzed hair, and a very tawdry hat.