“I wouldn’t take the responsibility,” he answered. “It would kill a man of your build in a week, and you couldn’t pass the first inspection, anyway.” And so ended my efforts through the employment agencies.
The newspapers are always an unfailing resort, as a hopeful source of information of any demand for labor. A newspaper in the very early morning, before the city is astir, is a treasure, for any clew to work can then be promptly followed up with some chance of one’s being the first to apply. Papers are to be had in abundance later in the day in public reading-rooms and about railway stations and hotel-corridors. It is, however, the newspaper damp from press that is most valuable to us, and between us and its possession is often the insuperable barrier of its price. The journals which early post their issues upon bulletin-boards are public benefactors, and about these boards in the early dawn often there are groups of men who study closely the “want columns.”
A very little experience was enough to disclose the fact that there is a wide difference in the character of these notices in different newspapers. In some issues the want-column is very short, but the statements bear every mark of genuineness; in others it is promisingly long, but, when carefully analyzed, it proves to be chiefly a collection of decoys for the unwary. The city seems to be full of men and women seeking employment. Not only are there the penniless common workmen of my class, whose number must be reckoned in many thousands, and among whom the professionally idle form, of course, a large percentage, but there are multitudes of mechanics and skilled workers, of whom Clark is a type. And beyond these is an army of seekers after salaried posts like those of clerks and bookkeepers and the various subordinate positions of business and professional life. Not all were penniless when they began their search for work there. Hundreds of them had a little store of money when their last employment gave out, or they brought with them when they came their savings, which they hopefully counted upon to last until a new place had been found.
How large a body of sharpers live by preying upon the credulity of these classes it would be difficult to discover, as it also would be difficult to discover all the tricks of their trade. The craft of the bunco-steerers is certainly well known, and yet it perennially finds its victims, and largely, no doubt, among the classes of whom I am speaking. But there are other snares, less sudden but quite as disastrous as those of the bunco-steerers, and far more insidious, since they have about them the apparent sanction of legitimate business. It is these that make most open use of the want-columns of certain of the newspapers. Agencies are advertised, and in them, after the payment of a small fee and the purchase of the needed outfit, large earnings are guaranteed as the result of putting some product upon the market. Opportunities are offered for the investment of a little capital—sums as low as five and ten dollars are solicited—and immense returns are promised. Requests for men are made in urgent terms: “Wanted—three—five—seven men at once. Steady employment guaranteed; good pay. No previous experience necessary. Apply at No. — —— Street, second floor front.”
One morning I marked a dozen or more of these notices in one newspaper, and carefully made the rounds of the addresses given. In every case I found an establishment which purported to do business at coloring photographs. I was offered employment in each instance. The conditions were as uniform as those governing a regular market. Two dollars was the invariable fee for being taught the secret of the process. One dollar would purchase the needed materials.
There was always a strong demand, enough to insure abundant work until spring. “Our agents are sending in large orders all the time,” was the conventional explanation. “You can soon learn to color ten or twelve photographs in a day, and we will pay you at the rate of three dollars a dozen for them.” The discovery that I had no money invariably brought the interview abruptly to an end in an atmosphere which cooled suddenly. I met many actual victims of these devices; one will serve as a type.
We both had been sitting for some time on a crowded bench in the lobby of a lodging-house. Each was absorbed in his own “bitterness,” and oblivious to the presence of other men and to the tumult of the room. My companion was cheerfully responsive when I spoke to him, and we both accepted gladly the relief of an interchange of confidence. He was three days beyond the end of his resources. So far he had been fortunate in securing the cost of food and the price of a ten-cent lodging, and had not yet been forced to the station-house. But on that evening, for the first time, he had learned of the station lodging. It loomed for him as the logic of events, and he dreaded it. It was of this that he was thinking gloomily when I spoke to him.
Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world. He had lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless. Then he worked for other farmers for two years, and studied as best he could. Finally he secured a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the summers.
His coming to Chicago was a stroke of ambition. A post as a salesman or a bookkeeper could be got, he had felt sure, if he was persistent enough in his search, and this, he thought, would serve him as a starting-point to a business career. He had counted upon a long, hard search for place, and so he had come forearmed with his savings, which, when he reached Chicago, more than two months before this evening, amounted to a little over fifty dollars when he found himself in lodgings in a decent flat on Division Street.
He paid at first two dollars a week for a room which contained a bed and bureau and a wash-stand, and which was warmed by a small oil-stove. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, and a shade at the window which looked out upon an alley and the blank brick wall of a house opposite. The bed-linen was changed once in two weeks. In addition to that outlay he was spending, on an average, fifty cents a day for food and an occasional dime in car-fare. All this was luxury. His last lodging, before he was forced upon the street, was a seventy-five-cent closet in a house on Meridian Street, on the West Side. The room contained a cot with an old mattress and some blankets, and there was a soap-box on end which would hold a lamp. He was obliged to wash himself at the sink in the public passage.