Of this group three women were married, one was widowed and three were young girls. One of the married women, whose husband was in jail and who had a three-year-old child—the victim of infantile paralysis—was receiving her rent from a church society. The woman who was widowed also had her rent paid by a church society. Two of the girls received help from their respective fathers in addition to their living expenses, and one woman supported herself and invalid husband on her earnings in this position and in the canneries where she worked during the season with her grandchild, the two earning about $8.00 a week. She was a wiry, industrious Hawaiian woman of about sixty, and it took much persuasion to get her story from her. The Hawaiians are not beggars and few of the old stock have been known to seek alms.
The proprietor, on having these facts called to his attention, said that he could hire Chinese boys at $3.00 a week and have the work done more efficiently. Yet even Chinese boys dependent on their own efforts cannot subsist decently on $3.00 a week.
In her address before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in Cleveland, held in June, 1912, Mrs. Florence Kelly, the dean and veritably the mother of industrial investigation, said:
“We cannot longer escape the knowledge that there is no more efficient cause of wholesale destitution in the United States than industry. It can be said with truth that poverty is the regular and inevitable byproduct of our present industry, as wealth is its normal product. We carry on our industry to produce wealth, and incidentally we produce wholesale poverty.
“Insufficient wages underlie a vast proportion of the need for correctional and reformatory work. They entail upon the community child labor, tuberculosis, underfeeding, lack of refreshing sleep and consequent nervous breakdown.
“They underlie industrial employment of mothers, whose neglected children fail in health and morals. The children in turn crowd the juvenile courts and custodial institutions....
“It behooves us all to put in practice as rapidly as we may some standard of payment for the working people having due relation to the expenditure of life itself, in the service of all, that is made by those who work for wages.”
A typical example of the spirit being developed among employers by a better knowledge of conditions is cited by Mrs. Kelley:
“A leading store in Boston—Filene’s—has for several months maintained a minimum wage of $8.00 a week. For many years this store had employed no one who had not finished the work of the eighth grade of the public schools. It has thus set for the whole country an example of retail trade as a field in which industry can be carried on under all the difficulties entailed by unlimited competition, with profit and success, and without producing poverty as its byproduct.”
In Honolulu working people can live comfortably on low wages,—in a greater degree of comfort than in any other community of which I have knowledge,—but in practically every family there is more than one wage-earner—the wife and children contributing their quota, however small.