Wherefore this silence? Because, unsophisticated reader, these same department stores are the largest and steadiest advertisers. The newspapers, which solemnly set themselves up as moral, ethical, and political instructors to the public, sell all the space desired to advertise goods many of which are fraudulent in nature or weight. Not a line objectionable to these department stores ever gets into newspaper print; on the contrary, the owners of these stores, by the bludgeon of their immense advertising, have the power, within certain limitations, of virtually acting as censors. The newspapers, whatever their pretensions, make no attempt to antagonize the powers from whom so large a portion of their revenue comes. It is a standing rule in newspaper offices in the cities, that not a specific mention of any unfavorable or discreditable matter occurring in department stores, or affecting the interests of the proprietors of those stores, is allowed to get into print. Thus it is that the general public are studiously kept in ignorance of the abominations incessantly going on in the large department stores.
OUTCASTS RATHER THAN SLAVES.
Notwithstanding this community of silence, in some respects akin to a huge compounded system of blackmail, it is generally known that department stores are often breeding stations of prostitution by reason of two factors—extremely low wages and environment. There can be no disputing the fact that these two working together, and perhaps superinduced by other compelling influences, do bring about a condition the upshot of which is prostitution. Such supine reports as those of the Consumers' League, an organization of well-disposed dilletantes, and of superficial purposes, give no insight into the real estate of affairs. In his rather sensational and vitriolic raking of Chicago, W. T. Stead strongly deals with the effects of department store conditions in filling the ranks of prostitutes. He quotes Dora Claflin, the proprietress of a brothel, as saying that such houses as hers obtained their inmates from the stores, those in particular where hours were long and the pay small.[174]
Mockery of mockeries that in this era of civilization, so-called, a system should prevail that yields far greater returns from selling the body than from honest industry!
It has been estimated that the number of young women who receive $2,500 in one year by the sale of their persons is larger than the number of women of all ages, in all businesses and professions, who make a similar sum by work of mind or hand.[175] But one of the most significant recognitions of the responsibility of department stores for the prevalence of prostitution, was the act of a member of the Illinois legislature, a few years ago, in introducing a resolution (which failed to pass) to investigate the department stores of Chicago on the ground that conditions in them led to a shocking state of immorality. The statement has been repeatedly made that nearly one-half of the outcast girls and women of Chicago have come from the department stores.[176]
It was not only by these methods that the firm of Marshall Field & Co. was so phenomenally successful in making money. In the background were other methods which belong to a different category. Whatever Field's practices—and they were venal and unscrupulous to a great degree, as will be shown—he was an astute organizer. He understood how to manipulate and use other men, and how to centralize business, and cut out the waste and junket of mercantile operations. In the evolutionary scheme of business he played his important part and a very necessary part it was, for which he must be given full credit. His methods, base as they were, were in no respect different from those of the rest of the commercial world, as a whole. The only difference was that he was more conspicuous and more successful.
CENTERING ALL PROFITS IN HIMSELF.
At a time when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those elements. Even if he were not, there were two sets of profits between him and the making of the goods—the jobber's profits and the manufacturer's.
Years before this vital fact was impressed upon the minds of the floundering retailers, Field understood, and acted upon, it. He became his own manufacturer and jobber. Thus he was complacently able to supply his department store with many goods at cost, and pocket the profits that otherwise would have gone to jobber and manufacturer. In, however, the very act of making three sets of profits, while many other stores made only one set, Field paid his employees at the retail store rate; that is to say, he paid no more in wages than the store which had to buy often from the jobber, who in turn, purchased from the manufacturer. With this salient fact in mind, one begins to get a clear insight into some of the reasons why Field made such enormous profits, and an understanding of the consequent contrast of his firm doing a business of $50,000,000 a year while thousands of his employees had to work for a wretched pittance. He could have afforded to have paid them many times more than they were getting and still would have made large profits. But this would have been an imbecilic violation of that established canon of business: Pay your employees as little as you can, and sell your goods for the highest price you can get.