The seventh question continues this same thought with variations: "There is an ample supply of money available for purposes of true charity. Does not true charity consist in refusing to give alms to those who can, or may, support themselves? Is it better to give alms to these people, in their attic, or to give alms to them under the conditions of the almshouse? What course would be most sure to pauperize them utterly?" For once, my critic and myself are in agreement. I believe it is better for one to partly support himself than not to do anything towards it. Nothing is more demoralizing to any one than to become accustomed to receive charity. But, after all, you may pauperize people almost as rapidly in the attic as in the almshouse. It is against the whole system that I make war. I do not admit, for a moment, that it is necessary for the sewing-woman to receive such wages as to compel her starvation, unless alms be given to her in her attic.
In the discourse which is thus criticised. I showed plainly that the aprons for which the seamstress received, net, one cent for making, returned a profit of fifteen cents, on an investment of ten cents by her employer. Now, I do not admit that the rigors of competition are so great that it compels this manufacturer to make one hundred and fifty per cent profit while this woman toils sixteen hours a day to make forty-five cents.
I showed that the women who make shirts made only fifty cents a day, and yet the proprietor made on every shirt twenty-two cents profit on an investment of twenty-eight cents. I do not admit that competition is so stern that it is necessary for this shirt manufacturer to make seventy-eight per cent profit while the woman who works for him must beg assistance of the Provident Association, or see her children cry for bread.
Or, take the case of the poor girl, whose mother finishes pants for the postal uniforms at nine and one-half cents a pair, slaving eighteen hours for fifty-seven cents; and she, the daughter, toils all day long, in the midst of the physical and moral stench of a Jewish sweater's shop, for sixteen and two-thirds cents. But she is better off than the orphan girl that works beside her, whose condition some poet has described:—
"Left there, nobody's daughter,
Child of disgrace and shame,
Nobody ever taught her
A mother's sweet saving name.
Nobody ever caring
Whether she stood or fell,
And men (are they men?) ensnaring
With the arts and the gold of hell!
Stitching with ceaseless labor
To earn her pitiful bread;
Begging a crust of a neighbor,
And getting a curse instead!
All through the long, hot summer,
All through the cold, dark time,
With fingers that numb and number
Grow, white as the frost's white rime.
Nobody ever conceiving
The throb of that warm, young life,
Nobody ever believing
The strain of that terrible strife!
Nobody kind words pouring
In that orphan heart's sad ear;
But all of us all ignoring,
What lies at our door so near!"