Passing through these quarters of abode of our foreign born brethren you will often find two or more families occupying a single room. Sometimes as many as a dozen people are to be found living in a small room. Often a family of five will take in lodgers at five cents a night. There are no beds. Chalk marks are made on the floor allotting a space 2x6 feet to each other. To add to their income they sell sour beer at 2 cents a quart. The place is filthy beyond belief. The upper floors are not quite so bad; but they contain sights that baffle description. The inmates are huddled together in disregard of cleanliness and decency. The rooms are dirty and the air is foul. The food is gathered principally from the garbage boxes of the streets or from the offal of the markets. The cooking is done from time to time and fills the room with horrible odors. There are no bedsteads. Filthy looking mattresses on the floor, or on boards placed upon supports. The inmates never undress, but go to bed with their clothes on, including their boots and shoes. The children are wan and pinched in appearance, and frightfully dirty. What wonder that sickness and disease hold high revel here!
Bad as is the lot of these people, they at least exist upon the face of the earth. Those who dwell in the cellars of these wretched quarters are infinitely worse off. They have but one entrance, and a single window gives light and ventilation. There is no outlet in the rear and the filth of the street drains steadily into them. They are occupied by the poorest of the poor, and the amount, of misery and wretchedness, dirt and squalor to be witnessed in them passes description. In the winter a stove heats the place, and renders the air so foul that one unaccustomed to it cannot breath in the room. Many of these cellars are lodging houses into which the wretched outcasts who walk the streets during the day, crowd for shelter at night. They pay from two to five cents for a night’s lodging, and sometimes as many as from twenty-five to fifty are packed in these terrible holes.
There are sections of many streets in the business part of the city that equal in wretchedness and misery those previously described. They are terrible streets, and even the police venture into them with caution. Drunken brawls, fights and stabbing affrays are of nightly occurrence.
John Chinaman is a stranger and a waif in the great city, but he has managed to establish a distinct quarter in Clark street. In other portions of the city are Chinese laundries, where the almond-eyed Celestials conduct their business of washing and ironing; but here are the headquarters of the Mongolians, their gaming and opium dens. Though peaceable as a rule, they are sometimes troublesome, and the police find them hard customers to handle. They are inveterate gamblers, and one of their chief dissipations consists in stupifying themselves by smoking opium. The opium dens are simply dirty rooms provided with wooden bunks, and sometimes beds, in which the smokers may lie and sleep off the effects of the terrible drug. Many of these places are patronized by white people, and some number women of the lower class among their customers. Half nude men and women of all nationalities and colors are sometimes found lying in heaps in a single room. These cases are rare, however, as the authorities are watchful for this class of law-breakers.
The Pawnbrokers
The stranger passing along Clark street is struck with the number of quiet, dingy looking shops over which are suspended the old sign of the Lombards—three gilt ball signs; all of the latter more or less dingy, may be seen in many other quarters of the city, but they are nowhere so numerous as in the street we have mentioned. These pawnbrokers’ shops, and, as a rule, the proprietors, are leeches—sucking the life blood of the poor, and grow rich upon their miseries. Of course, in all large cities there must of necessity be a great aggregation of poverty and misery. To the poor, the pawnbroker is a necessity. They must have some place to which they can repair at once and, by pledging such articles as they possess, raise the pittance they so sorely need. Municipal legislators the world over recognize this necessity, and endeavor to throw such safeguards around the business of pawnbroking that the poor shall not be entirely at the mercy of the brokers. The great state of Illinois has in the last few years passed a state pawners law which has given to thousands of the poor low rates of interest.
In Chicago the law requires that licenses to do business as pawnbrokers shall be issued to none but persons of known good character. The Mayor of the city alone has the power of issuing such licenses, and mayors of all parties have been in the habit of putting a very liberal construction upon the law. None but those so licensed can do business in Chicago. Mayors of all cliques and parties, have exercised their power with apparently little sense of the responsibility which rests upon them. They have not ordinarily at least, required clear proof of the integrity of the applicants, but have usually licensed every applicant possessed of particular or other influence. There is scarcely an instance where they have revoked a license thus granted, even when they have been furnished with proofs of the dishonesty of the holders.
Very few, if any pawnbrokers, pay any attention to the law. They know that the great majority of their customers are ignorant of the provisions of the statutes and that those who are familiar with it will not avail themselves of its protection, as they fear to lose the favor of the pawnbrokers. Consequently they fix their own rate of interest, which may be said to average five per cent per month, or any fractional part of a month, or sixty per cent per year. Some of the more unscrupulous members of the fraternity, where dealings are exclusively with the poor, charge a much higher rate, extorting as much as ten per cent a month from those whose needs are very great.