So many of these sweatshops grew around the kitchen that rent rose in the neighbourhood. Still a bookbinding concern found it convenient to abandon a lease of years and move the whole factory to where it was nearer the blessed spot. More than half of the men working around never received more than one dollar per day and when they went on strike it was an easy matter to fill their places with the people of the dung hill.
In my presence a prospective manufacturer, discussing the merits of different localities for his plant, was willing to pay $80 per month more for one site than the other because it was in the neighbourhood of the kitchen. He would have cheaper labour. He did underbid all the other contractors and prospered and is an influential member of organised charity to-day.
The small manufacturer advises his men where to get cheap meals. At the kitchen. Cheap kitchens for the poor? Cheap kitchens are for the rich. Kitchens! A place where the spiders spread their web to catch the hungry flies—to suck their blood.
CHOCOLATE
Investigating in Paris (France) the conditions of charity institutions I was struck by one particularly funny custom which prevailed in one of them. After the applicant had been tortured and questioned until he would prefer death to a renewal of the ordeal he was given as many packages of chocolates as he had children, chocolate of the best kind, also a certain amount of meat and bread tickets. On the back of each ticket was written the stores where he could exchange it for meat or bread.
One of the investigators, having told me that "they" sold these tickets, especially the meat tickets, I decided to find out the reason for this. I stationed myself in a butcher's shop around the Place de la Bastile, whose name and address was on the back of a ticket. Until 10 A. M. I had not seen a single ticket coming and I was already drawing certain conclusions when I saw a woman coming in. She laid down on the table five francs' worth of tickets and got two francs in exchange. Then another and another one came and all received forty per cent. of the value. Why?
The next day I obtained a few tickets myself, and going into another butcher shop whose address was also marked on the back of the ticket I ordered four pounds of meat. Politely the man served me, and when he had tied up the parcel nicely, I tendered him the tickets. The man got red with rage and brusquely snatched the parcel, put his meat back on the nails, then, still without speaking a word, only looking daggers at me, he proceeded to scrape together all the spoiled pieces and bones he could find. This he weighed, and wrapping it up in a piece of dirty paper he handed it to me with the remark: "That's good enough for you."