It would be interesting to discover the idea entertained at the department as to what constitutes ill-treatment.
“Out of 18,000 women investigated, the largest number, 2,647 earn $200 and under $250 per annum, 2,377 earn from $250 to $300. The concentration, it will be seen by consulting the tables, comes on earnings ranging from $150 per year to $350 per year.”
“It is quite clear from the various investigations that have been made, that there is little, if any, improvement in the amount of earnings which a woman can secure by working in the industries open to her; her earnings are not only ridiculously low, but dangerously so.”
“The summary by cities, tables xxx, pp. 530 to 531, would seem to indicate that the majority are now in receipt of fair wages when the whole body of working women is considered.”
When such self-contradictory “information” is placed before the public as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of irrelevant reformation created chiefly within the last decade. Certainly in comparison with the first report of Mr. Wright’s Massachusetts incumbency, the present one indicates a retrogression as marked as it is injurious.
Defective as it is, however, this information is the latest that we have, and it indicates terrible poverty among the better situated manual workers.
The average wages of the employed during employment being decidedly less than a dollar a day, it is not strange that homelessness grows and the police department reports:—
“As will be seen, the enormous number of 4,649,660 cheap lodgings were furnished during the year, to which should be added the 150,812 lodgings furnished in the station-houses, making a total of 4,800,472. If tenement-house life leads to immorality and vice, certainly the fifty-eight lodging-houses in the Eleventh Precinct, furnishing 1,243,200 lodgings in one year, must have the same or a worse tendency. Reflection upon the figures contained in the above will lead to the conclusion that we have a large population of impecunious people (all males) which ought to be regarded with some concern. It is shown above that an average of 13,152 persons, without homes and the influence of family, lodged nightly in the station-houses, and in these poorly provided dormitories, an army of idlers willing or forced. It is respectfully submitted that social reformers would here find a field for speculation, if not for considerable activity.”
Into whose hands can our half a billion of added wealth have wandered, that it leaves more than twelve thousand human beings homeless throughout the year? And is the growth of such poverty, not retrogression?
It is urged from time to time that New York is no typical study for American conditions because of the immigration that forever flows through it, and the abnormally large proportion of the “unfittest” left as our residuum. But in comparison with the armies of the unfit systematically produced by our industrial system, the stratum of residuum deposited in the metropolis by the flood of immigration rolling westward, is too trivial to disturb the equanimity of candid observers. Only the perverted vision which leads New York’s most famous charitable institutions to imprison beggars and kidnap the children of the very poor in the name of philanthropy, can so confuse cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the nation’s work in an orderly manner, every recruit would be so much clear gain. It is the disorganization of our moribund industrial system which leaves no welcome for the immigrants save as the tenement-house agent may bleed them, and the sweating contractor “grind their bones to make his bread.” It is this disorganization which turns the source of our finest reinforcement into a means of demoralization and temporary retrogression.