In this connection only city employments have been mentioned, but the same reasoning may be applied with greater force to factory life in any of our manufacturing districts. There the operatives of both sexes in one mill may sometimes be counted by hundreds, and their large numbers cause a more frequent and constant communication than in smaller workshops. It has been urged in support of the superior morality of such places, that the very nature of the employment requires the most constant attention to be paid to it, and precludes the possibility of any idle time. We freely concede to the apologists all the advantages they claim, and admit that during the time—say ten hours daily—when the machinery is running, neither males nor females can abandon their respective positions; but, unfortunately for the force of the argument, the motion is not a perpetual one. A steam-engine or a water-wheel can run for a week or a month without complaining of fatigue, but human machines become exhausted after a few hours’ consecutive labor. Machinery can receive the necessary attention and supplies without arresting its progress, but men and women must sometimes cease work in order to eat and drink.
Granting, then, that during actual working hours a young woman can not leave her post, yet the mind is free, and the range of thought, when locomotion is denied her, will often turn to the hardships of her position. Busy as may be her hands, her brain is disengaged, and while her mechanical duties are adroitly performed, the mental faculties will be in full exercise, and for these she has ample scope. Dissatisfied with her close confinement in the factory, weary of the dreadful monotony which makes to-day but a repetition of yesterday and a sure type of to-morrow, she is happy, when the bell rings the signal to leave work, to escape from the building, and renew outside its walls an acquaintance she has formed before; and too frequently the persuasions and promises of her lover will induce her to seek, in some less guarded position, the independence for which she longs. It may be taken as a general rule that any confinement or restraint which is irksome to human nature must result injuriously.
Domestic servants are not exempt from temptation when employed in large establishments where both sexes are engaged, and many a poor girl ascribes her ruin to the associations formed in places of this description.
Thus far it has been supposed that man is the chief agent in the propagation of vice, nor is there any apparent reason to recede from that position. The numerous cases of seduction under false promises and subsequent desertion; of seduction by married men; of violations of helpless and unprotected females, are abundantly sufficient to prove this, much as it may be regretted for the credit of the stronger sex, and also to vindicate the opinion that employing males and females under one roof, in different branches of the same business, has a strong tendency to promote prostitution. Sometimes, however, it is true that woman, lost and abandoned herself, lends her aid to drag her fellow-women down to perdition. In many of the stores and workshops in our city, in every factory throughout the country, such are to be found, and their insidious influence is quickly felt. By false representations and elaborate coloring, they work upon the minds of the simple, or inflame the passions of the ambitious, but in either case their object is the same, and in it they frequently succeed.
Question. What business did your father follow?
This table shows that almost all classes of society are exposed to the influences which result in prostitution, from the children of men of property, bankers, merchants, and professional men, down to the families of mechanics and laborers. The numerous and varied occupations of the fathers of those women who answered the question renders any classification of them almost impossible. A majority of the parents were either mechanics or laborers, men who earned the daily food for themselves and families by manual labor, and whose resources would be governed by the ordinary fluctuations of trade.
In following the proportion of natives and foreigners as exhibited in previous tables, it must be remembered that about five eighths of these fathers were residents of other countries than the United States when those daughters were born whose replies form the bases of these statistics, and it is scarcely necessary to say that labor is nowhere so well remunerated as with us. The average wages, for instance, of a first-class mechanic in England or Ireland seldom exceed, and, indeed, rarely amount to, nine dollars per week, and an ordinary laborer is very well paid if he receives half that sum. This estimate refers to large cities, where the expenses of maintaining a family are as heavy as in New York, and it indicates poverty, which has already been proved to be one of the main causes of female depravity.
If the investigation is pursued into the rural districts of Great Britain, the wages of mechanics and laborers will be found lower than they are in large cities, without any material reduction in the necessary expenditure except in the item of house-rent. The pitiful amounts paid to agricultural laborers (often only twenty-five cents a day) will surprise any one who is not fully acquainted with the hardships endured by this unfortunate class, and the state of destitution in which they are compelled to exist (it can not, with any propriety, be called living), and to rear their families.
More than one half of the foreigners are from Ireland, and no person acquainted with the social history of that unhappy country need be told of the want and deprivation endured by its peasantry, of their useless efforts to benefit themselves, or of the ruin, starvation, and disease with which they are so frequently afflicted. To constitute a farmer in Ireland, a man must hire an acre or two of land, for which he pays a heavy rent, as two or sometimes three “middle-men” have to obtain their profits before the landlord receives his share. In this field he plants as many potatoes as can be crowded into it; and in his hut or cabin he keeps a pig or some fowls, regularly domesticated as members of the family, and receiving more attention than the children. From the sale of the pig the rent has to be obtained, and from the proceeds of the poultry, with the potatoes, all their wants have to be supplied. Thus, with the potatoes he raises for almost his sole means of support, with peat from some bog in the neighborhood to furnish him with fuel, he lives until the impoverished soil refuses to yield its annual crop, or yields it in a diseased and poisonous state, when fever and starvation come to fill his cup of misery, and render him dependent upon charity for an existence. And this in a land peculiarly rich in all that is necessary to make its people a great and happy nation.