"Oh, I don't spend it all," I was answered. "I send a portion of my wages home to my wife and children to Russia," said one.
"How do you live, then?"
"We eat at the Folks' Kitchen," was the answer.
And there and then I found that nine men out of every ten eating there were employed by one of the other of the manufacturers who contributed to the fund of the kitchen. Any wonder the project immediately materialised? And not only have they given money but the rich send their wives and daughters to serve the poor.
In investigating the cases of those that applied for clothes for their children, the charities eliminated those whose fathers or mothers were on strike at the factories of W. or M. D.—"Fortunate he who can know the causes of things."
I took this kitchen as a sample. Those in other cities, cosmopolitan centres, are the same. Take the Baron de Rothschild kitchen in Paris. Aside from the fact that the food given there is rotten, that the potatoes served are alcoholised, the bread green with mould and the meat unspeakably odorous, aside from all this, a swarm of little sweatshop keepers are continually around the kitchen where they engage cheap labour.
Cheap! Ye gods. I have tried it myself. They paid me 20 cents a day for fourteen hours' work in an umbrella and cane factory. I worked there a full week and was not the only one. Next to my bench, in front and across, all over, newly arrived men and boys were polishing the sticks, rubbing them so hard that the hands bled. A brother of the manufacturer was watching and driving.
"Come on, come on."
Then in the evening they all ran to the kitchen to get their meal. When they found out I was not green, I was immediately discharged. They wanted only ignorant men, newly arrived men.
Down in the painting room they employed girls. It was more a house of prostitution than a working room. The poor ignorant girls, harvested from the kitchen, were debauched while they painted canes and polished handles.