"If mistakes are made, they are charged to the saleswomen and cash-girls. Generally, the goods are placed in a bin and slide down to the floor below. If a check is lost, the goods are charged to the saleswoman, though it may be the fault of the shipping-clerk. In some stores the fines are divided between the superintendent and the time-keeper. In one store where these fines amounted to three thousand dollars, the superintendent was heard to reproach the time-keeper with not being strict enough. Men's wages are very low," says Miss Woodbridge, "but it seems that they can not fall below the point where existence is possible. Women's wages, however, have no low limit, since the paths of shame are always open to them. Cases might be cited where frail, delicate women, unable to exist on the salaries they earn, are forced to crime or suicide. The story of Mrs. Henderson, who threw herself from the attic window of a lodging-house some time ago, is the story of many another.

"There have been many such instances in the last two weeks. Mrs. Henderson could not live on the salaries offered her. She could live if she accepted the 'propositions' of her employers. The hope of an easier life, the fear of death, and the natural clinging to life, turn many working-women into the paths of shame." Miss Woodbridge further adds that "in Paris it is an understood fact that women who are employed in shops cannot exist without assistance from other questionable sources, and," she continues, "unless something is done at once, this must also become the case in our land, where we pride ourselves on our respect for honest toil."

Helen Campbell, in her "Prisoners of Poverty," opens a little window into the terrible temptation which comes to generous young souls under this pressure of unrequited toil. In her true story of Rose Haggerty, who was sewing her very life into the support of her orphan brothers and sisters, we have a practical illustration of the results of this injustice. "There came a Saturday night when she took her bundle of work,—shirts again, and now eighty-five cents a dozen (it is worse than that under some of our Boston sweaters); there were five dozen, and when the dollar and a half was laid away for rent, it was easy to see what was left for food, coal, and light. Clothing had ceased to be a part of the question. The children were barefoot. They had a bit of meat on Sunday; but for the rest, bread, potatoes, and tea were the diet, with cabbage and a bit of pork, now and then, for luxuries.

"Nora (a little sick sister) had been failing, and to-night Rose planned to buy her 'something with a taste to it,' and looked at the sausages hanging in long links with a sudden reckless determination to get enough for all. She was faint with hunger, and staggered as she passed a basement restaurant, from which came savory smells, snuffed longingly by some half-starved children. Her turn was long in coming; and as she laid her bundle on the counter, she saw suddenly that her needle had 'jumped,' and that half an inch or so of band required re-sewing. As she looked, the foreman's knife slipped under the place, and in a moment half the band had been ripped. 'That's no good,' he said. 'You are getting botchier all the time.' 'Give it to me,' Rose pleaded. 'I'll do it over.' 'Take it if you like,' he said indifferently, 'but there is no pay for that kind o' work.' He had counted her money as he spoke, and Rose cried out as she saw the sum: 'Do you mean you will cheat me of the whole dozen, because half an inch on one has gone wrong?' 'Call it what you like,' he said. 'R. & Co. ain't going to send out anything but first-class work. Stand out of the way and let the next have a chance. There's your three dollars and forty cents.'

"Rose went out silently, choking down rash words that would have lost her work altogether; but as she left the dark stairs, and felt again the cutting wind from the river, she stood still, something more than despair on her face. The children could hardly fare worse without her than with her. The river could not be colder than this cold world that gave her no chance, and that had no place for anything but rascals.

"She turned toward it as the thought came; but some one had her arm, and she cried out suddenly, and tried to wrench away. 'Easy now,' a voice said. 'You're breakin' your heart for trouble, an' here I am in the nick o' time. Come with me an' you'll have no more of it, for my pocket's full to-night, and that's more than it'll be in the mornin' if you do n' take me in tow.' It was a sailor from a merchantman just in, and Rose looked at him for a moment. Then she took his arm and walked toward Roosevelt Street. It might be dishonor, but it was certainly food and warmth for the children, and what did it matter? She had fought her fight for twenty years, and it had been a vain struggle."



When she poured her heart-breaking story into Helen Campbell's ears, she said, "Let God Almighty judge who's to blame most—I that was driven, or them that drove me to the pass I'm in."

Ah! but you say, even as you sigh over this fearful picture, "That is in wicked New York." Yes, but Boston has its tragedies equally as heartrending and shameful. During this past week a thoroughly respectable young married woman, whose evidence is indisputable, and who, prior to her marriage, had worked for several years as a saleswoman in the Boston stores, told me that at one time her employer told her that, on account of the dull season, he would have to discharge her, but that he would give her a good recommendation, and if she would take it to another prominent dry-goods house, which he named, he thought she would at once secure employment. She took the letter of commendation, and went as directed. The employing agent of the firm to which she was sent asked her how much salary she had been receiving, and she answered, "Five dollars a week." He replied, "I cannot pay you that much, I can only give you three dollars a week;" to which she answered, "I can hardly live on what I have now, and I could not possibly live on three dollars a week." He replied, with an insulting and meaning smile, "You would have to depend on the outside friend for that." She looked him in the eye, and said, "I want to earn an honest living, and I don't want any outside friend," and at that walked away. She told her employer of her reception; and he said he did not intend to discharge her, but had heard that this firm was in the habit of doing that sort of thing, and was determined to find out if it were true.

I received a letter from a gentleman in Conway, N. H., this week, who writes, not knowing that I was intending to discuss this question: "After you have given the sweating-system one round, can you not take up the question of the girls working in the big stores? I have just heard a well-authenticated account of a man high in authority in one of the largest stores, suggesting the way to ruin to a young girl from the country, who said, when she learned what her wages were to be, that they would not be sufficient to give her a bare support. This not only shows the attitude of these wealthy merchants to the souls of their working-girls, but it shows that they are conscious of their attitude, and have deliberately chosen to take it." I am told, upon undoubtedly credible testimony, that another young woman who came to Boston from the country, and sought work in several stores, was so outraged at the vile suggestions which were made to her about means of adding to her salary, that she went back to the house of her friend,—a lady of as high standing as any in the city,—and cried and sobbed all night long. She said she would beg or starve before she would submit herself to such outrage again.

It is impossible to turn these incidents aside as exaggerations. They are horrible, I know; but the most horrible thing about them is, that they are true. You will say perhaps, as some have said during the past few weeks of my exposure of the sweat-shops, "What good will it all do, this harrowing of people's minds with these cruel stories?"

I do not know how much good will be done. I only know that I could not retain my self-respect and keep silent.

Nothing is more foolish than for us to keep still, hoping that in some way these wrongs will remedy themselves. Shall we look to the sweater, the chattel-mortgage shark, the lecherous merchant, to reform themselves? They do not care how long, nor at what a pittance, men and women work, or to what fearful extremities they are driven. Reforms will never come from the gold-box of Mammon. We must cry aloud and spare not until these devilish cruelties and unblushing crimes are impossible in our fair city.

The words of the Christ, as interpreted by James Russell Lowell, are ringing in my ears:—

"With gates of silver and bars of gold, Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold. I have heard the dropping of their tears In heaven these eighteen hundred years."

Then if we reply with the selfish assurance of some of these pharisaical political economists who are criticising me to-day:—

"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, We build but as our fathers built; Behold Thine images, how they stand, Sovereign and sole, through all the land."

How his answer will put us to shame and confusion:—

"Then Christ sought out an artisan, A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin, Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set He in the midst of them, And as they drew back their garment-hem, For fear of defilement, 'Lo here,' said He, 'The IMAGES ye have made of Me!'"



VI.

THE WAGES AND TEMPTATIONS OF WORKING-PEOPLE.

"Face to face with shame and insult Since she drew her baby breath, Were it strange to find her knocking At the cruel door of death? Were it strange if she should parley With the great arch fiend of sin?"

—ALICE CARY: The Edge of Doom.

I have been asked to give a reason for the faith that is in me in regard to certain painful charges made by me in a recent sermon on Wages and Morals—to the effect that the persons high in authority in some respectable Boston stores regard favorably immoral relations on the part of the employees, in order to make it possible for them to live on the slender wages paid them.

Without repeating here any of the cases mentioned in my sermon, which has had considerable publicity through the daily press, permit me to quote Mr. Henry Chase, agent of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. He says that in conversation with a leading Boston merchant, the merchant said plainly that he had every reason to believe that some of the men working in his store paid the room-rent and a trifling sum besides to working-girls, and lived with them regularly. Another Boston merchant said to Mr. Chase that he regarded that kind of life on the part of his clerks favorably; that the wages these young men received made it impossible for them to marry and support a wife.

I am informed of another case, upon perfectly credible authority, of two young women, strangers in the city, who applied to a leading store for a situation and were offered work, but when informed of the wages they were to receive, exclaimed, "How could we live on such wages as that?" The employment agent of the house replied, "It is presumed you will have a gentleman friend to assist you." The girls looked at him dumfounded for a moment; and when his meaning dawned upon the one who had acted as spokesman, she burst into tears and they hurried from the store. Only the dread of bringing unpleasant notoriety to these thoroughly respectable young women saved this scoundrel from a horsewhipping at the hands of their indignant male relatives.

A leading Boston lady of wealth and social standing, writing to thank me for calling public attention to the subject, says that she herself knew of a girl who was told to "'look to her gentleman friends' for the means to eke out a bare livelihood supplied by her wages in a prominent store;" and adds: "Such things are outrageous, and it is well you are making them known." I have within the past week received another letter from the president of the W. C. T. U. in one of the Boston wards, a lady who has had more than twenty-five years' experience in practical reform work in this city. She says: "I have just read in my Congregationalist the reference to your sermon of last Sunday on the officials in two of our large Boston stores suggesting immoral means of eking out their scanty wages to their employees. I want to thank you for presenting this terrible wickedness existing among us, and if the extent could only be known, every white-ribbon woman in Boston would boycott those stores. I could call names of splendid young women, thrown on their own resources, applying for situations, who were cursed, as we might say, with a good face and a fine figure, fairly insulted with offers made. More young girls have been ruined in that way than in any other. In sheer desperation, not even earning enough to pay the rent of a mean attic and keep hunger away, to say nothing of clothing and other things, they have, after spending the last cent, and not having anything to take them home, resorted to the last means."

This is a terrible letter—terribly true. I could go on, column after column, with these details. "But," the critic says, "why don't you name these firms, and put them in the pillory of public contempt?" I can tell you why in a few words. You cannot name the firms without giving the name of the young woman thus wickedly approached; and to name any young woman in such a connection, no matter how innocent or pure she is, is to put a mark upon her as long as she lives.

No woman is willing to run that gantlet; and so, in the very nature of the case, it would rarely happen that you could publicly punish the guilty party. "Well, then," says the critic, "you would better hold your peace." Let us consider that a moment. If a burglary has been committed in town, do you keep silent until you are prepared to name the burglar and publicly indict him for trial? No, indeed. You tell all the neighbors, and publish in all the newspapers, that such a house has been invaded, that burglars are in town. What is the good of doing this? Why, any school-boy knows that it is a blessing to every other householder in the town. It puts people on their guard, and calls special attention to their bolts and locks. If there is any good reason why we should not follow the same common-sense course in this matter under consideration, I do not know what it is.

I do not bring a broad, sweeping accusation against either class of persons especially concerned in this article. I am no defamer of my kind. I believe that the majority of Boston merchants are honest, pure-minded men. I believe that the majority of Boston working-women, old or young, are as pure and noble as any women in the world. Nevertheless, I have stated in this article undeniable facts—facts which I can substantiate to the satisfaction of any honest man or woman who, still doubting, cares to see me personally about the matter. These facts are serious enough to give us all reason for solemn and earnest reflection.



VII.

BOSTON'S UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

"That each should in his house abide, Therefore was the world so wide."

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON: Fragments of Nature and Life.

When, over one-half of our land, there hung the black pall of African slavery, no other one thing, perhaps, did more to reveal the terrible cruelty of the system, and to arouse the indignation of the civilized world, than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

In June, 1882, when the elite of American literature gathered at Boston to celebrate her seventieth birthday, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes read a poem in which Mrs. Stowe's share in the emancipation of the colored race was recorded with equal wit and pathos:—

"When Archimedes so long ago Spoke out so grandly, 'Dos pou sto— Give me a place to stand on; I'll move your planet for you now,' He little dreamed or fancied how The sto at last should find its pou For woman's faith to land on.

Her lever was the wand of art, Her fulcrum was the human heart, Whence all unfailing aid is; She moved the earth, its thunders pealed, Its mountains shook, its temples reeled, The blood-red fountains were unsealed, And Moloch sunk to Hades."

Mrs. Stowe, in the preface of her son's biography of herself, aptly quotes the words of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth in the "Pilgrim's Progress:" "My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." May God grant us courage and skill to use the memory of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to serve the "white slaves" of our own time and city!

To begin by quoting from Mrs. Stowe's famous story: "The cabin of Uncle Tom was a small log building close adjoining to 'the house,' as the negro par excellence designates his master's dwelling. In front it had a neat garden-patch where every summer strawberries, raspberries, and a variety of fruits and vegetables flourished under careful training." This little log house was a small and crowded dwelling-place for Uncle Tom and his wife and little ones, yet it had several things in its favor. In the first place it had plenty of sunshine and pure air. It was an individual cabin, occupied by Uncle Tom's family alone. The climate was sunshiny; and when Uncle Tom's wife, Aunt Chloe, wanted to wash, she could build a fire out in the open air, and spread her clothing on the fragrant raspberry-bushes, while her woolly-headed little flock were sent scampering over the pastures and fields.

Now let us look at the Boston cabins. In the first place, there are no individual cabins for the poor. The price of land makes that impossible. A big Boston tenement house means from four to ten cabins on a floor, and from three to six floors under one roof. In a great many of these sunlight is an impossibility. Boston is peculiarly cursed with the rear tenement. All through the North End and some parts of the West End and "the Cove," there abound dark courts, oftentimes reached only by a tunnel, that are almost entirely barren of the sunlight. For instance, there is a court off North Street, reached by a tunnel such as I have described, where the tenement houses are three deep from the street.



The inside tenement, facing on the court, through most of the year is densely packed with people. For a large part of the length of the court it is only four feet wide, and the front windows of the house, which is three stories in height, look out on the dark wall which is only four feet away. On a dark day there is scarcely any light at all in these rooms; and on the brightest sunshiny day there is only a little light during the middle of the day, and never any direct rays of the sun. I found, up in one of these rooms, a young woman with her first-born in her arms,—a pale, sickly little child, not yet a year old, that will certainly die before the summer is out, if it stays there. This poor young mother was born in Maine, and followed her husband down here from the green fields and the breath of the pines. The husband works out of the city during the day, coming home late in the evening and going out in the morning; but all day long the mother and wife is kept here with her invalid child. Their faces look like potato-vines that have sprouted and grown in the cellar. They are dying for the lack of sunshine and pure air.



Modern science is imperative in its urgent emphasis on the influence of light and sunshine on health; and we are told that children brought up even in close valleys do not thrive so well as those raised on the hillsides or the tablelands, and that families through the generations grow smaller in stature, and less vigorous in physical and mental force, if much excluded from light and sunshine. He was a wise old father who lived out on the plains, and came to visit his son, who had moved into a deep mountain gorge. At family prayers he thanked the Lord that his son was still well, although he lived where the sun rose at nine o'clock in the morning and set at four in the afternoon. But there are scores of Boston tenement houses where the sun never rises at all, except on the roof-tops, or now and then sends a slant ray, thrown down into the dark court in seeming mockery. It is impossible for any one to get from language alone, either spoken or written, an adequate idea of the loneliness, the sense of gloom, the filth and squalor, of the apartments in some of these Boston tenement houses. It requires a strong stomach, and a still stronger determination that nothing shall thwart you from knowing how your brothers and sisters live, to take you the second time into such a place. Go with me into one that is not ten minutes' walk from the mansions of wealth and luxury on Beacon Hill. We go back through a narrow passage, where you can touch the walls on either side of you, and then down some steps into a dark underground court. Now you have to bend over almost double till you feel your way to a door on your left, and knock. In answer to the "Come," you open the door and go in, and are barely able to stand upright inside the room. We are in a cellar about ten feet square, and this is separated from others like it by a partition. We are really in one room of a big cellar stretching under a crowded tenement house over our heads. We look around us; and as soon as our eyes get accustomed to the darkness—for the only light is from the narrow width of glass, reaching from the ground up to the floor which forms the ceiling of the room where we stand—we see that this is the den—for you cannot call it anything else—of an old man and his wife. They have both passed threescore. Their locks are white, and they are no longer able to work as hard as formerly.



They have had children, but they are dead. The two old people, waifs from bonny Scotland, have probably made their last move, until the city sends around its rough box and dead-cart to take them to their last sleep in the Potter's Field. They used to live up-stairs; but as they grew older, and were not so spry as formerly, they could no longer pay the rent, and therefore moved down till at last they are at the bottom. For this den of misery, in which a well-to-do Western farmer would not think of keeping his hog, they pay one dollar per week. They have to cook, eat, sleep, and do everything else pertaining to domestic life, in this one dark, filthy hole. The combination of smells is indescribable. But as you begin to sicken and are ready to flee, you remember, with a shock, that what sickens you so in five minutes this old white-headed man and his wife have to endure day after day, and night after night, and on—and on—there is no hope of anything better this side of a pauper's grave. Don't blame these old people for not keeping their den clean. Nobody could keep it clean. There is no sunshine, and only a little while in the day any light at all. It is necessarily damp and mouldy. We talk with the old man. He goes fishing and does such odd jobs as he is able. He says one of the worst things with which they have to contend is the rats; and then he points out places in the wall, down next to the ground, that he has filled with little billets of wood, stuck in every-which-way, in his efforts to keep the rats from preying on them, at night. Let us foot up the column.

Old age, with its accompanying weakness and loss of hopefulness and courage; darkness, with the brooding sense of gloom and melancholy that goes with it; noisome smells, that make even a breath of the narrow, crowded street seem like a draught from Paradise; filth, mould, and rats that compete with you for what really has been taken from their appropriate domain,—and yet remember that down there, in all that, and more, for no tongue or pen can tell its wretchedness, live hundreds of your brothers and sisters. Not the drunken and the dissolute only, for about this place which I have described, or its tenants, there was not the slightest suggestion of liquor anywhere. Down on North Street is an old house which, the traditions tell us, was originally built for a "wayside inn," in the good old days before the word hotel was so well known as now. It is not a very large house, as tenement houses go, yet the missionary who is with me assures me that he has found as many as thirty families stowed away under its roof. A wall is built up around the rear and on one side, corralling a little breathing-space or side yard. A stable for two horses comes out of this space; and the stench from these stalls mingles with the stench of the water-closets which are all situated in this yard, and the united fumes rise to every rear window of the establishment.

The stairways are rickety and filthy. We go in at two places to sample the tenantry. In the first we find an old Irish woman who lives here with her two boys. She keeps house for them in two little rooms. Everything is poverty-stricken and dirty. The poor old woman is a wreck in body and in mind. She has buried seven daughters. She says, "I've buried a good flock. Too much trouble broke my very life out of me." We go in at another door. Here is an English woman; she has two children and keeps a boarder. She scrubs now in a bank building, and washes at other places. She sewed for a long time. At first she was paid fourteen cents a pair for finishing pants, then thirteen cents, then twelve cents, and finally ten cents, and then, as it was impossible to get bread for her children on what she could earn, she went to scrubbing. Being a very rugged woman physically, she is able to do this. If she had been frail and delicate, with a young babe, she would have been compelled to keep on finishing pants at ten cents a pair.



It is hot and dirty here everywhere. How could it be otherwise? Every one of these housekeepers must have a fire in her room every time she wants hot water for washing or any other purpose. Take the day of my visit,—one of the hottest in June; it is ninety degrees in the shade, but with the fire in the rickety stove in the room in which this mother and her little girl are working, it cannot be less than a hundred and thirty. But the fire cannot go out, or the washing will stop, and there will be no food to-morrow. For these two miserable sweat-boxes—the paper half torn off, bed-bug dens that nothing could thoroughly cleanse except a fire that would exterminate the very walls—she pays two dollars and a half per week. As a striking illustration of the good results of agitation on these subjects, I called at this house during the past week, when one of the tenants told me that my repeated visits to the place, and the fact that I had had a photographer there making views of it, had awakened so much comment in the section that the landlord had got frightened and had had the corridors washed, and had put new paper on some of the rooms.

Off Norman Street in the West End is a court which I have visited during the past week in company with two other gentlemen. The houses on this court are occupied by Italian fruit-venders for the most part.

The court itself is littered up with refuse and decayed fruit in a most filthy and unhealthy manner. In one of these large tenement houses there is no family which occupies more than one room. Let us investigate a few of them. Here is a room fifteen feet long. At its narrow end it is only five feet six inches wide, and at the other end not quite seven feet wide. In this narrow lane five people live. Huge strings of bananas in every stage of ripening hang over the piles of filthy bedding. It is in the second story, and the corridor in front, which is forty-three inches wide—unusually spacious, as you will see later—is half taken up with boxes of decaying fruit, buckets of slops, and piles of refuse. The walls are as black and rusty as the stove.

Here is another family residence in this building. The size is ten and one-half by ten and one-fourth feet. Four people live here. The entire furnishings are not worth five dollars. The cupboard is a lemon-box with a partition in it, set on the floor. The bread, kneaded and ready to bake, is laid out on an old, dirty, colored handkerchief on the pile of bedding; there are no chairs, table, or other furniture of any kind. Another room which also answers for home for four people, is sixteen feet long and six feet five inches wide. The walls here, as in many other rooms, have large sections of the plastering torn off, and are blackened with many years of smoke and dirt.



The next family we visit has three people. The room is seven by nine feet. The bed covers all except thirty-one inches on one end, and twenty-four inches on one side. There are boxes of fruit under the bed, some of it decaying; what is too rotten to sell must serve for home consumption. And so we go on, room after room, and floor after floor. Now, section fourteen of the law in regard to tenement houses says: "The tenant of any lodging-house or tenement house shall thoroughly cleanse all the rooms, floors, windows, and doors of the house, or part of the house, of which he is the tenant, to the satisfaction of the Board of Health; and the owner or lessee shall well and sufficiently, to the satisfaction of said board, whitewash and otherwise cleanse the walls and ceilings thereof, once at least in every year, in the months of April or May, and have the privies, drains, and cesspools kept in good order, and the passages and stairs kept clean and in good condition."

Now, I have no desire or intention to do any injustice to the members of the Board of Health. They may be over-worked, and have an insufficient force to pay proper attention to their duties; but I state only the simple fact—and I am sure it is a fact that the people generally ought to know—when I say that there is a shameful and dangerous lack of such attention in many of these tenement houses. In regard to the houses I have just described the law is a dead letter. The passages and stairs are filthy beyond description. Some of these corridors are only twenty, twenty-three, and twenty-nine inches wide, and yet, dark and narrow as they are, they are largely filled up with piles of refuse and garbage. In one of these buildings the water-closet on the landing has had the door taken down and put away, so that it stands open day and night.



On some of the walls of these living rooms the cockroaches and bed-bugs swarm in abundance, literally by hundreds, at ten o'clock in the morning. The walls and ceilings have not only not been cleansed or whitened this year, but it must have been many years since there has been an attempt made to clean them. In one of these bedrooms I counted twenty-five boxes of lemons, besides great bunches of half-ripened bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms. The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings, far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place, for their sign is put up over the doors of these rooms, telling how many are allowed to sleep in each room; but they might as well have kept the sign in the office for all the good it has done, for in nearly every room the inmates admitted to the Italian interpreter who accompanied me, that from two to three times as many persons occupied the room as the sign permits. One of these buildings, four stories high, is so old and rickety that it cannot stand alone, and has careened over against the building next to it. Everything is of wood, and if it was once on fire, with its narrow, obstructed halls and stairways, the swarm of tenants would burn like rats in a trap.

This is by no means an isolated case. When Rev. Mr. Barnett, of Whitechapel, London, was here a few days ago, one of the inspectors of the Board of Health took him to visit some of the tenement houses of South Boston and the North End. A Boston Herald reporter went with them, and I quote from his report of the trip: "The party first visited the tenement houses of South Boston, occupied for the most part by the fishermen and their families, and the poorer classes of the Irish population. The first one visited was the house known as the Slate block on First Street. Here was seen one of the best examples of the worst class of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied with regarding whitewashing, and the walls were dirty and stained with smoke. Hardly a house was seen, in the whole course of the journey, where this simple law in the interest of health and sanitary condition of living had been observed. In many cases, it appeared as though it had not only been neglected this spring, but for many springs in the past. In driving from this section of the city to the North End, Mr. Barnett made the somewhat startling remark, 'We have nothing nearly so bad as this in Whitechapel.'"



Doesn't it seem a little strange to an outsider that the Board of Health keep on hand, as it were, block after block of tenement houses, where both landlords and tenants deliberately set the law at defiance, which they can show off at call? There could not be a greater folly than to put this question aside as a matter only interesting to those poor people themselves. The slavery of Uncle Tom and his woolly-headed children cursed the plantation house, in the end, as much as it did the cabin. We must look after these people and help them for the sake of others, if not on their own account. Dr. John S. Billings, in an address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in February of this year, says: "When diphtheria prevails in a tenement house, many school children are endangered, and the most perfect plumbing in a house affords little protection against the entrance of this disease, if it is prevailing in the vicinity. Typhus and smallpox do not confine their ravages to the vicious and foul, after they have acquired malignancy amongst them. Mingled with those who might not be worth saving, is a much larger number of honest, industrious, and fairly intelligent and energetic poor people who live by days' wages, and are struggling against their surroundings to improve their condition, and especially to give their children a fairer chance in the race for life than they themselves have had. These last are the people whom it is worth while to help for their own sake. You will observe," says this cool-headed doctor, "that I am considering this matter entirely from the money point of view, without reference to religion or morals or altruism. The question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is far more important, I admit; but I confine myself to a lower plane—to the bread-and-butter aspects of municipal life. Great numbers of the incompetent, vicious, idle, deformed, or starved-brain class have been poured into this country by immigration during the last fifty years, and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are from two to three times as great as those of the better class of population; one-fourth of their sickness is treated by charities, and one-third of those who die among them are buried at public expense. The districts in which they live require a larger proportion of the work of city officials, inspections, removal of nuisances, police, the courts, etc.; and, on the other hand, they contribute but little to municipal or other taxation. All this is well known; but we have not yet arrived at the stage of applying efficient and systematic prevention, which is perfectly possible, and are still pottering with the so-called remedies which are of little use. In these districts the deaths usually outnumber the births, so that if it were not for a continued stream of new recruits this population would diminish. How can accessions be prevented? One way is to get rid of and prevent additions to the kind of dwellings these people seek. Do you say that they must live somewhere, and that there must be such places for such people? I do not think so. It is not necessary that any city should allow the existence of any such houses within its limits; and if their destruction forces some persons into the almshouses, and drives others away, it will be the cheapest and best in the end."

There are scores, and I think I should be safe to say hundreds, of tenement houses within the city limits of Boston which are unfit to be inhabited, and where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a sufficiently large rent to pay good interest on a clean, healthful tenement. Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike challenged by this condition of things.

Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston "cabins" and their miserable tenants, you will say, "They are at least free, they cannot be bought and sold like Uncle Tom." Alas! they are not free. True, no one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and women were making a fine class of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find it impossible to save. The lower strata of wages in Boston, and in all our large cities, has reached the point where the people who depend on them labor simply to exist. One day's sickness in father or mother or child leaves a gap it takes weeks or months to bridge over again.



Sometimes a Southern Uncle Tom or Aunt Chloe had their son or daughter sold out of their arms, leaving them with broken hearts. But the white slaves of the tenement house sound every deep of human agony. Think what it is to try to raise boys honest, when their playmates are thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of lust had devoured her one ewe lamb before she was yet thirteen years of age! Brothers, it is not yet time for the "abolitionist" to put aside his tocsin or his sword while so many of our brothers and sisters are living and sighing in their despair:—

"Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel, Forgetting that the world is fair;

Where no babe we cherish lest its soul perish, Where our mirth is crime, our love a snare."



VIII.

SOCIAL MICROBES IN BOSTON TENEMENT HOUSES, AND HOW TO DESTROY THEM.

"Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be."

—ALFRED TENNYSON: In Memoriam.

The greatest claim Job ever makes for himself is that in the days of his prosperity, when everybody knew him and was obsequious to him as a rich man, he was not only kind to the poor, but exhibited for them a genuine sympathy which was illustrated in his carefully searching out the causes of their troubles.

There is a good deal that passes for kindness and sympathy, in these days, that is nothing more than lazy good-nature. Ignorant or indifferent charity is often as mischievous in its results as the wicked greed of the skinflint and the miser. Sympathy, to be worth any thing, must be incarnated, as in Job's case, so that it becomes feet to the lame and eyes to the blind. Frances Power Cobbe declares that the most Christ-like thing she ever heard from human lips, was from the "Good Earl" of Shaftesbury:—

"The friend of all the friendless 'neath the sun; Whose hand had wiped away a thousand tears; Whose eloquent lips and clear, strong brain have done God's holy service through his fourscore years."

When he was speaking to her one day, in his study, of the wrongs of young girls, which he had just been investigating, the tears came to his eyes and his voice trembled. After a pause, he added, "When I feel how old I am, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong, but I feel I cannot bear to go and leave the world with all the misery in it."

People who have no genuine sympathy for their fellows, oftentimes grow harder-hearted at a revelation of the miseries of the oppressed, which stirs nobler souls to their profoundest depths and awakens them to all manner of helpful benevolence. There is an old legend of St. Hilary Loricatus, who scourged himself so perpetually that his skin became like the hide of a rhinoceros. So, acquaintance with the sorrows and woes of the poor and unfortunate, acquired out of a morbid curiosity, or a hunger for that kind of emotion experienced by the reader of sensational novels, will result only in marring and hardening us.

Very different is the result of such knowledge when obtained through an earnest sympathy and a holy ambition to assuage the sorrows of the distressed. Shelley never wrote anything more beautiful, perhaps, than this:—

"In sacred Athens, near the fane Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood; Serve not the unknown God in vain, But pay that broken shrine again, Love for hate, and tears for blood."

I put this emphasis on the need of searching out the wrongs of the poor, because I am satisfied that one of the greatest factors in the present tenement-house situation is the ignorance and indifference of the people as to the condition of things in the slum tenement house. I am sure that nothing but good can come from an honest attempt to "let in the light of day upon the landlordism of the slums, as you have let it in upon Mormonism, and other hateful things that prefer darkness rather than light."

We need to bear in mind constantly, in considering this question, that society is a whole, and that an evil in one class of our citizenship cannot help but have its vicious influence, in a greater or less degree, upon every other portion of society. We must also remember that the bad tenement house is the birthplace and cradle, and to a large extent the schoolroom, of multitudes of boys and girls who are to exert their influence on every phase of our city life in the near future. Modern scientists have pursued the study of disease microbes with such diligence, that they claim to be able to recognize beyond mistake the germs of certain diseases. They find them in the atmosphere almost everywhere, and they prove that these microbes are real germs of disease, by their experiments with the lower animals.

The soil under our feet is full of these micro-organisms. The smallest quantity of earth put in water reveals, through the microscope, besides the organic and mineral matter, a mass of beings more or less complex, moving more or less rapidly. A German author, Mr. Reimers, has calculated that every cubic centimetre of earth may contain several million germs.



Among these microbes some have not been studied, and the part they play in the economy of life is not known to us, while certain others have functions which have been well determined. Carbuncle, for instance, is one of the most terrible maladies which can attack cattle, and sometimes even men. Now-a-days, thanks to the labors of the scientists, this malady had become quite rare, and tends more and more to disappear. For a long time it has been known that carbuncle has been due to a particular microbe, but it was not known how it was propagated. M. Pasteur has demonstrated that this propagation was due, in part at least, to the longevity of the germs.

Thus it is, if you bury the dead body of an animal which has died of carbuncle, in a ditch five or six feet deep, and cover it with earth, the carbuncle bacteria will be found in the neighboring soil several years after the interment. We can understand, then, that cattle put to graze on this land, or fed by provender from it, may contract the disease. So when the cause of this malady was unknown, it is not to be wondered at that superstitious country people called these places "cursed fields."

There are social microbes no less potent and mischievous than those with which Pasteur deals. Some of those who are infected with the contagion are put away in pest-houses or in prisons; many more walk the streets, and spread their dangerous infection through the social, business, and home life of the people. My claim is that the bad tenement house in Boston, as everywhere else where people are herded together in crowded filthy quarters, where sanitary laws are neglected or defied either by landlords or tenants, or both, furnishes a breeding-place for the microbes of nearly every sin and vice that infest our modern society. The editor of the Portland Oregonian, commenting on General Booth's scheme for the rescue of the London poor, says: "Its most hopeful features are those which propose to provide the lowly with means to help themselves, in the building and maintenance of homes. Thousands of women belonging to the 'submerged tenth' need almost as much instruction in the simple acts of housewifely thrift and neatness, as the squaws belonging to the North American Indian tribes.



"Homes, in the civilized sense of the term, they have never had to keep, and their squalid abiding-places, overrun with wretched and quarrelsome half-clad children, and bare of the commonest comforts of life, have offered very unattractive fields for womanly originality and painstaking endeavor. A cheerful, quiet home, wherein the laborer is always sure of warmth and light and wholesome food, has in it a saving grace which all the creeds in Christendom cannot compass without its auxiliary aid."

The power of the liquor traffic, and all the other kindred vices that cluster about it, is constantly re-enforced by the social conditions of the neglected tenement house. Temptation enters as largely into drunkenness as into any other vice; and in the foul and fetid courts of the North End, the West End, South Boston, and the Cove, temptation to vice of every kind is ever present. The words of George R. Simms, in his earnest study of life in the homes of the London poor, apply with equal force to such sections in Boston: "The complete lack of home comforts, the necessity of dulling every finer sense in order to endure the surrounding horrors, the absence of anything to enter into competition with the light and glitter of the gin palace, and the cheapness of the drink in comparison with food, all these contribute to make the poor easy victims to intemperance. Among the poor, the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life, and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their condition, do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican dispenses at so much a glass. Ask any of the temperance workers in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighborhood, and gradually sink under the degrading influences of their surroundings. There are a few men who have worked to keep their brethen from the clutches of the drink fiend who would not gladly hail the advent of air, light, and cleanliness, and the enforcement of sanitary laws, as the best weapons with which to do doughty deeds in their combats with intemperance among the poor."

One of the hardest things to deal with, in an attempt to arouse good people who are well-to-do and steadily prosperous to a serious study of the troubles of the poor, is to shake them out of the erroneous conviction that it is always the fault of the poor that they are in financial straits and compelled to resort to such places of dwelling. Put yourself in your brother's place, and listen to this true story of New England life enacted during the past year.

There lived, until a little over a year ago, in Western New York, a family which we will call Simmons,—far removed from the real name. The family consisted of the husband and wife, each about thirty-five years of age, and four children,—the eldest ten. Mr. Simmons was a confectioner by trade, but for some years had been travelling for a wholesale grocer's house in New York. He was a man of good address, and was fairly successful until, in some of the competitions of trade, the New York house determined to withdraw from that section, and he was thrown out of business. After casting about for several weeks in a vain attempt to get employment, he decided to bring his family with him to New England. They removed to Worcester, where for months he sought employment, but was unable to find anything except short jobs for a day or two at a time. Mrs. Simmons, who was an educated and refilled woman, and a most worthy lady in every respect, did what she could to assist her husband; but as a fifth child was born to them in the autumn, she was so weakened by sickness and the care of her children, that she could do little besides looking after them. As the months passed, they were compelled to resort to the pawnshop—the bank of the unfortunate. First went their silverware, which was mostly wedding presents, an anguish to part with to people of their history and character. Then followed their best clothing, and some splendid books out of a well-selected library—for remember that these were educated, intelligent people, with all the instincts and tastes of good breeding. Finally, discouraged with Worcester, they removed, with what they had left, to Boston. Again for weary days, stretching into weeks, went on the disheartening search for work. Mr. Simmons says in those days the very iron entered into his soul. To see his refined, cultivated wife sick and wasting away, his children improperly clothed and hungry, and compelled, day by day, to return to the tenement house on the filthy street whither his condition had forced him, with a feeling of utter helplessness, he declares that nothing but the religious convictions of his youth, and the sense of the cowardice of the act, saved him from the death of the suicide.



During the winter they were compelled to sell their excellent cooking-range, which they had brought with them from New York, and procure a cheaper one. All the books that were left followed; then the bedsteads and other furniture went, until there was only one bedstead left, and that was rented through the day to a man who worked nights. Many days they had nothing to eat but bread or crackers—and often that was of a stale quality and a scant allowance. The eldest, a little boy, attended the Sunday-school of a Boston church; he has one of the truest, noblest, and most interesting faces I have ever seen. On missing him for a couple of Sundays, the superintendent of the school went in search of him, and for the first time knew of the condition of the family.



The Sunday-school superintendent found his little scholar lying in a dry-goods box,—for there was no bed in the daytime,—sick from lack of food and clothing. He made inquiries of the mother, and at last, with sobs and tears, she told their story. Their necessities were relieved, and through the sympathetic interest of a number of Christian men the husband now has steady employment. Now, it is easy to say that he should have gone to the church, or the charities, with the story of his condition—and I think that is true; but, on the other hand, you can see that it was the very worthiness of the family, their very nobility, that made that course seem more bitter than starvation. Bear in mind that these people were not dissipated, that they were strictly moral and religious, and that both father and mother were of prepossessing appearance. This man did not drink, or smoke, or chew, and was intensely anxious to take care of his family; he was willing to do the humblest work, and preferred death to begging or dishonor.

Only a few weeks since, I called, with a brother minister, on a family of Maine people in a miserable tenement house in the North End. The husband and father had been sick and out of work for a good while. A short time before my visit, however, he had shipped on a coaster from Hyannis to Philadelphia. He had arranged for a little credit for his family to keep them from starving, until his expected return; but the winds had been contrary, and he was several days overdue. The wife and four children were in despair. They had had nothing since the morning of the day before, and then only bread and water, except a little broth which a neighbor, not much better off, brought in to one of the children—a beautiful little girl, sick with what would be "la grippe" on Beacon Hill, but is only "grip" down in the slums. The mother had a little babe, and was in such delicate health that it was impossible for her to go out to wash or scrub. Her two narrow little rooms were scrupulously neat and clean, as were her children; but the tears ran down her cheeks as, in answer to our questions, she confessed, as if she had been admitting a crime, poor soul, that they had had nothing to eat all day.

I give you these instances to show you how false is the idea that poverty and enforced residence in a miserable tenement house are a badge of sin or wrong-doing. But think of the agony of fathers and mothers, who love their children as well as you love yours, and have ambitions for them as holy and pure, who are compelled to see their loved ones deteriorating under their eyes, and through the contamination of the poisonous moral atmosphere which they breathe, dropping slowly, but certainly, down to a level with the brutality which surrounds them.



Well, you ask, what is the remedy for all this? My main purpose, in this series of discourses, was to place the facts of the situation before the people. But I have some plain, practical, common-sense suggestions to make. In the first place, we want an almost infinitely better system of inspection of tenement houses. Every tenement house in the city, having as many as eight families in it, ought to be inspected carefully, at least once a month—and once a week would be better—by an officer who holds his place under civil-service rules, entirely independent of politics, and who is held to a strict responsibility for the performance of his duties.

As to the tenement-house sweat-shop, I am convinced that a very simple law, which ought to be passed by the next legislature, requiring every manufacturer, of any kind, to file with the inspector of factories a list of the names and addresses of the people who work for him, would work wonders. It may be that there are some firms as low down as the one whose superintendent remarked the other day, when asked what the effect would be in their business if it were known that their goods were manufactured in filthy tenement houses: "It would make no difference at all; our customers would buy of us just the same, no matter where our garments were made." This firm, I am sure, would find itself mistaken, and, with a great many others, would break off its connection with the sweating-business if the law forced it to make that relation public.

Yet I am sure that nothing promises so much for reform as a revival of conscientious landlordism. The landlord is now, too often, as one well says, "an enormous wealthy estate, with heirs scattered here and there, who hire an agent, as their Southern brothers hired an overseer, irresponsible, unsympathetic, caring only to please his patrons, by showing a large balance of profit. And the poorer the tenement, the larger the balance. No repairs, no janitor, no supervision to pay for; accommodations so wretched that only the very wretched, who will expect to be crowded and miserable, will apply for it. O landlord! or 'estate!' too busy to collect your own rents, be not too indolent to require of your agent a strict account when he brings you twenty per cent instead of six! You would quickly bring him to book if he were suddenly to hand you six instead of twenty, but the time to question him is when it is twenty."

Mrs. Alice Wellington Rollins says in the Forum, speaking of New York: "Nothing is more astonishing, in investigating the slums, than the discovery of the enormous prices the poor are paying for the most wretched accommodations. One man boasts that he draws thirty-three per cent on his tenement investments." The same writer wisely says, farther: "The landlord is not to be a philanthropist, willing to sacrifice himself for the good of others; he is to be an intelligent capitalist, putting in his money purely as an investment, and philanthropic only to the degree of being satisfied with six per cent returns, of hiring a janitor to be on hand day and night, of being his own agent, or keeping a sharp lookout on the one he may have to employ, and of urging his wife to collect the rents. But individual landlordism need not necessarily be confined to individual persons. Individual corporations can become landlords. Why should not some of the insurance companies that complain of being unable to find suitable investments for their immense funds, take hold of the tenement question? A life-insurance company of Boston, complaining of the low rates of interest obtainable, announce that they never expect over five per cent, and find it difficult at times to get four.

"Half of the trouble is caused by the wilful cruelty, but half by the thoughtlessness, of the landlords. A wise writer has said recently: 'Often you don't need to say to a man, "Why do you do so?" If you can show him what he is doing, it is often enough to rouse him to reform.' I have faith enough in human nature to believe that if we could organize a procession of landlords and compel them to walk through the tenement districts, they would begin the reform themselves."

Let me relate to you a very interesting experiment that has indeed long since passed the era of experiment. In 1879 Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln and a young lady friend were so wrought upon by the filth and misery which they saw in certain tenement houses visited by them, in connection with the Associated Charities, that they determined to do something to better the condition of these poor people. They hired a large house on the corner of Chardon and Merrimac Streets. It contained twenty-seven tenements, and the rent agreed upon with the owner was one thousand dollars a year, though since the first year they have paid twelve hundred. The house had the worst possible reputation morally, and had been under the ban of the police for a long time.

It was, at the time they took it, half empty, because of the degraded character of the occupants. Its entries and corridors were blackened with smoke, and dingy and uninviting. The sinks were in dark corners, and were foul and disease-breeding. The stairways were innocent of water or broom, and throughout the entire house, from top to bottom, ceilings, walls, stairways—everything was dirty and neglected. It was surely not an attractive task to attempt to bring cleanliness and order out of such chaos, but these resolute young reformers deliberately set themselves to perform the seemingly impossible. The interior was painted, improved means of lighting and ventilating the sinks were ordered, and wood and coal closets arranged for each tenement on its own landing.



Previously the tenants had to keep their fuel in the cellar. The mouldy wall-paper was removed from the entries, and a fresh surface of plastering was put on. A few of the worst tenants had to be removed, but the majority, pleased with the new administration of things, were willing to accept its rules and remain. Tenants were soon found for every room; and this house, which had been regarded as very unhealthy, and had been a regular hive for fevers under the old regime of carelessness and greed, that did not care how dirty the tenants were so long as they paid their rent, under the new rule of cleanliness became so healthy that disease was almost unknown, and was, and is to this day, known by the tenants and the neighborhood generally as the "Good Luck House." The ladies collected their own rents, and kept everything well under their own supervision. A close account was kept of all receipts and expenditures, and at the end of the first year the balance of cash in hand was $111.67, or more than eleven per cent on the investment. The second year it was still more profitable, the net sum at the end of the year being $157.47. Mrs. Lincoln still carries on the administration of the "Good Luck House," and no queen was ever treated with more genuine respect than she is there. She is regarded as a most practical sort of patron saint to the institution. Yet there is no element of charity suggested in her dealings with her tenants. It is simply Christian justice. She seeks with great care to help them retain their self-respect, and treats them as fully her equal in personal responsibility. The rent is required to be paid regularly. One rigid rule enforced upon all tenants is cleanliness. She pays for the weekly scrubbing of the halls and stairways, but the tenants are required to sweep them every day, in turn. The sinks and drains are kept clean. All this has a marvellous effect on the home habits of the inmates; and I have seen as clean and tidy rooms in the "Good Luck" tenement house as I have seen anywhere, and that, too, on days when they were caught unawares, it not being the regular rent day, when they expect the landlady. All above six per cent has been put in the bank as an emergency fund, and, from time to time, the tenants have been permitted to share some unexpected pleasure from this. Once a splendid entertainment was given the tenants, in a public hall, with stereopticon views; at another time, it took a more material method of expression, and a good blanket, a pitcher and basin for each family, came out of this fund. In every way the tenants are made to know that their interests are in perfect harmony with those of the landlady. To encourage them to use more room, where they are able to pay for it, a discount is made on each additional room taken, and ten cents a week is deducted for payment in advance. A majority of them avail themselves of this privilege.

If he who makes a tree to grow where none grew before, is a public benefactor, surely she who has made it possible for many family-trees to grow and thrive, yielding their fragrance and their fruit in a pure home and social life, is a benefactress in the highest sense.

Let us encourage on every side the transformation of filthy, neglected tenements into "Good Luck" houses.



A little wise thoughtfulness may vastly improve the childhood of the slums. Boys' clubs and girls' clubs are steps in the right direction. They awaken an interest in innocent games, afford a glimpse of beautiful pictures, and give zest to the intellectual appetite for fresh, wholesome books. The "sand garden" is also a happy thought. Think of thousands of children reared in the narrowest, filthiest quarters, who have never had a chance to make even a mud-pie out in the pure air of heaven. It may seem a small thing to some, but it is a tragedy to me. When I remember my own happy childhood over in the Oregon woods, where I ran as free and untrammelled as a young colt in the pasture, and made mud-pies beside the brook that had its home in a great bubbling spring on the hillside, breathing the air fragrant with the perfume of wild lilies, while robins and bobolinks and meadow larks sported and sang without fear, on every side—when I contrast a childhood like that with the child-life in the Boston slums, I am heart-broken. There is nothing so sad as this "murder of the innocents" that is going on in all our great cities. Marianne Farningham sings their dirge:—

"Such sights there are in the great sin-soiled city, As might compel an angel into pity; But none more sad in all the world of care, Than a young child driven to black despair!"

Surely, trumpet blast never called men and women to a holier crusade than this rescue of the lost childhood of the slums.



IX.

OLD WORLD TIDES IN BOSTON.

"There is a poor blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel, Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, Till the vast temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies."

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The Warning.

Travellers tell us that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result of some strange convulsion of the earth, the coast-line has sunk down and down, until the incoming tide of the salt sea has swept over it, and schools of porpoises and fishes swim among the branches of old forest trees that in the former time were accustomed to the chatter of squirrels and songs of birds.

Any one studying the older and more historic sections of Boston will see many relics of a past civilization by which he will be impressed in very much the same way as is the sailor who looks on the remains of an ancient forest in the ocean's bed. Standing in the North End, in front of the "Copp's Hill Burying-ground," and looking up at the tower of Christ Church where the famous signal lanterns were hung, one can almost hear the old church appropriating the words of the poet:—

"By time's highway—a milestone gray— I watch the world march by; An endless stream of moving men Rolls on beneath mine eye. Still, still they go; where, none can know; And when one wave is gone, Another and another yet Come ever surging on."

It seems strange indeed to go up and down some of these old historic streets, and yet never in the course of one's walk hear spoken the language of the country. In the course of my investigations during the past few months, I have found it impossible to do anything practical without an interpreter, sometimes in one language, and again in another. Often in entering an old rear tenement house, where filth and misery held riot, I have been astonished at the splendidly carved ornaments over the doorways, and the still-to-be-traced carving on the balustrade. Once these old rear tenements were the abodes of Boston's wealthiest and most cultivated citizens; but the Old World tide has come in, and house after house, block after block, and street upon street, have been overwhelmed by the waves of people who speak other languages, and whose habits of life are more foreign than their speech.



I have no sympathy with those people who are crying out against all foreigners, yet it seems to me that no serious student of the signs of the times can take other than a sober view of the submerging tide of foreign immigration which has come into this country, of which the North End of Boston is a suggestive illustration. The consideration which causes the most sober thought among earnest men to-day, is the entirely different class of immigration coming to us now from that of former times. In the earlier days of American history it was the intelligent, self-reliant part of the European communities who dared the expense and hardship of the long sea voyage by a sailing-vessel, and faced the exigencies of the New World. The immigrants of those days were mostly farmers and skilled mechanics, who brought with them the habit and prestige of success. But under the new order of things, with the great steam ferries which make a passage to America only a brief holiday trip of a week, with reduced rates, and controlled by companies who scour every European city, by aid of their agents, to gather in their human cargoes from the poorest and most ignorant of all the labor classes, it becomes a very different question.



The motives that impel people to this country now, are very different from what they used to be. The San Francisco Alta well says: "The time was when the majority of foreign immigrants came because of an intelligent devotion to free government. Ninety-nine per cent of them were free from merely material motives. They were not urged by starvation, they did not come in the squalid steerage, they did not, on landing, feel compelled to invent servile occupations, before unknown in this country, merely to get the crusts and scraps that would keep them alive. Their motive was intellectual more than material. Their descendants are found in every State, of good report, foremost among the fibres that make up American character. Their blood may have been in the beginning English, Irish, Scotch, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Scandinavian, or Slav. No matter: they are now Americans, because the expatriation of their ancestors was real, and not unreal. Its motive was ethical, and not material. At present ninety-nine per cent of all immigrants come for material reasons only. Their decision to migrate to the United States is not for lack of liberty, but for lack of bread. The purpose is animal entirely. Every old emigrant from any country in Europe knows this to be so. The Italian who genuinely expatriated himself, who believed in Joseph Mazzini, and sought liberty for its own sake, finds no fraternity in the Italian immigration that has poured upon us since the suppression of the murder guilds of Sicily, and the decline of the industry of assassination in that country."



I think it is indeed one of the hopeful features of the situation that nearly all our adopted citizens, who are themselves thoroughly Americanized, share strongly in this view. Indeed, many of them seem to realize the danger more keenly than do the native-born citizens. I was very much interested, at the New England Chautauqua the other day, to hear Mr. John M. Langston, the colored orator of Virginia, read a letter from a leading Hebrew of Washington City, in which he reminded Mr. Langston that he had often pleaded the cause of the Negro, and appealed to him in turn to plead the cause of the Hebrew, by arousing public sentiment against the too rapid influx of Russian Jews.



The swift incoming of these Old World tides has very close relation to the wages of laboring people. Large numbers of the alien laborers who are coming now, are little better than "slaves of contractors, steamship lines, and the professional European jobbers in pauper labor. The large proportion of those engaged in our mines and on public works have been secured through these sources, either in direct defiance of our laws or by the evasion of the laws. They come in direct competition with the native-born and the worthy foreign immigrant, who comes here for the purpose of applying for citizenship and securing a home. They not only come into competition with every worthy class of laborers, but they are, for the most part, too ignorant to comprehend American institutions, and have no broader idea of liberty than to insist that it includes license. At every point of contact with our labor system, they debase it."

An illustration of this class of labor may be found in the fact that a year or two ago forty-seven alien miners employed in phosphate mines near Waterboro, S.C., were imprisoned because they refused to fulfil the contract under which they had been employed. Their story was that they had been met at Castle Garden by labor agents who induced them to sign a paper which they did not understand, but which proved to be a contract to work for one and two dollars a week in the phosphate mines, and board themselves. When they learned, on their first payday, of the trick which had been played upon them, they revolted. A few days in jail, however, induced them to return to work on the old terms.

The Chicago America, commenting on the incident, says this picture is a startling contrast to the prate of demagogues concerning the dignity of American labor. While they scheme to get the votes of intelligent workingmen, labor in many parts of this country is being enslaved by means of the hordes of foreigners who are imported in violation of law and right. Mr. Powderly tells, in the North American Review, of a visit which he paid to a mining-camp to investigate the condition of the men who were imported to take the places of American workmen who had demanded higher wages for labor done. These men lived in huge barracks. Their dining-room, smoking-room, sitting-room, kitchen, and bedchamber were one. There were five rows of bunks, three deep, each one thirty inches in width and seventy-eight inches long—the first bunk eighteen inches from the floor, the next, supported by rough hemlock posts, but two feet above it, and a third two feet above the second one. Each bunk was filled with straw, and covered with coarse coffee-sack material for bed-clothing. Two rows of hemlock boards, each one twenty feet in length by three feet in width, constituted the tables. The men came in from the mines while he was present, and, before washing face or hands, sat down to their supper of salt pork, meal, and water. One hundred and five men lived in a building one hundred and sixty feet in length by thirty feet in width. He found no one to answer him in the English tongue. When it was bedtime they lay down without divesting themselves of a single article of clothing; some of them took off their shoes, but the majority did not even do that. These men took the places of American workmen who were receiving from two dollars to two dollars and a half per day. The compensation allowed them was but seventy-five cents a day, and board. As a careful investigation proved that fifteen and three-eighths cents would provide the food furnished each man, the outlay was but ninety and three-eighths cents a day. It is getting to be quite a common custom on railroads and in mines and other places where this class of laborers are employed, to attach to the waistband of each man a leather strap fastened to a large brass check, similar to a baggage check. Every check bears a number, and the man who carries it, or to whom it is fastened, is known by the number on his check. Mr. Powderly grimly comments: "Fancy the future of the American laborer, whose name is forgotten, and whose only means of identification rests with a brass check, which may be substituted for another while he sleeps." If this is not white slavery, what is it?

These Old World tides have also close relation to the health of our cities. Large numbers of these people have been accustomed to live in crowded quarters, on insufficient food, and without any regard for cleanliness, in their native country. They come here, bringing all their filthy habits, bred in them sometimes for generations. I have no doubt that some of my critics tell the truth when they say that the squalid tenements occupied by the Russian Jews and Italians in Boston are better than the homes whence they came. So far as these foreigners themselves are concerned, even these wretched conditions are perhaps an upward step in evolution. But if we are going to have Naples in Boston, we must expect to have Neapolitan cholera epidemics as well.



These Old World tides have also a very close relation to the morals of our people. An overwhelming majority of all the criminals who figure in our police courts, and are supported in our jails and penitentiaries, were born abroad. This is very easy to understand when one investigates a little the methods used to encourage emigration to this country. The investigation made by the Ford Congressional committee revealed the enormous extent to which steamship companies are drumming Europe for human freight, to be dumped on our shores. "To those unscrupulous 'fishers of men' everything that walks or crawls is acceptable. Quantity, not quality, is the desideratum. The worse the specimen, the more effective, usually, is the emigration prize offered, and the less the opposition interposed by government officials. In a word, a drag-net has been thrown over nearly the entire European continent, with the result of having recently collected for shipment to this country a class of humanity, which, wherever it may be, is a menace to good order and a tax upon the police and charity departments of the country."

One who speaks with the highest authority on questions of political economy puts the immigration problem in a strong light when he says: "We are now draining off great stagnant pools of population which no current of intellectual or moral activity has stirred for ages. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of those who represent the very lowest stage of degradation to which human beings can be reduced by hopelessness, hunger, squalor, and superstition, are found among the new citizens whom the last decade has brought into the Republic." It is known beyond doubt that prisoners' aid societies in various European countries have been steadily shipping convicts to the United States. Neither has it been an uncommon thing for criminals to be let off by the courts, on condition of their emigrating to America. It is folly for us to expect to take this great criminal class, who were born to crime in the purlieus of European cities, who have been thieves from their cradles, and who come to us fresh from jails and prisons, and change them into useful citizens. They will not only continue to be criminals themselves, but they will spread their vile and wicked contagion wherever they go. There is not a single cause of reform or progress in this country that is not constantly discouraged and postponed by these Old World tides of ignorance and vice.



There can be no doubt that there is a rising tide of public sentiment in this country in favor of a careful and wise examination of every emigrant who offers himself as a candidate for American citizenship in the future. I think, in view of the fact that we are getting a very large and increasing proportion of our immigration from Southern Europe, which is the most illiterate portion of the Old World—in Southern Italy, for instance, seventy-nine out of every one hundred are illiterate—there ought to be an educational test. There is certainly no wisdom in our adding hundreds of thousands a year to the number of illiterates already here, who are unable to read the Declaration of Independence, and have not the faintest conception of the principles of our Constitution. The examination of emigrants ought to be on the other side of the water. We have had many recent illustrations in Boston of the manifest hardships experienced under the present arrangement. Every person intending to emigrate to America ought to be required to give notice of that desire through the nearest American Consul, and furnish a clean bill of health, both moral and physical; and no one should be permitted to sail without a certificate of such investigation and satisfactory finding. This would not shut out any one who would be of value to American institutions, but it would require European countries to care for the criminals and paupers which their own social system has bred.

But what shall we do with these multitudes of foreigners who are already living in our midst? In the first place, we must cease to regard them as foreigners or aliens, and set to work with a definite purpose to Americanize them as quickly as possible. We must not, for a moment, be satisfied to let them herd together in the filth and squalor to which they may have been accustomed at home. We cannot afford to hand them over to the greedy tyranny of the sweater. Nothing will help us more than the abolition of the neglected tenement house, and the provision for a healthier, cleaner shelter for the people.



Some of our public-spirited men of wealth cannot do better than to look in this direction as a field in which to make their mark upon the uplift of their race and their time. There is a far greater demand for this class of benevolent investments than there is for added colleges or universities. If some of the vile and unhealthy tenements that have been described recently, not only by myself but by the reporters and the daily press, could be replaced by such buildings as the Victoria Square building in Liverpool, it would be a great public benefaction. On the former site of Victoria Square were miserable tenement houses. To-day a magnificent structure stands there, built around a hollow square, the larger portion of which is given up for a healthful play-ground for the children. "The halls and stairways of the building are broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements, perfect. The apartments are divided into one, two, and three rooms each. No room is smaller than thirteen by eight feet six inches; most of them are twelve by thirteen feet four inches.

"All the ceilings are nine feet high. A superintendent looks after the building. The tenants are expected to be orderly, and keep their apartments clean. The roomy character of halls and chambers may be inferred from the fact that there are only two hundred and seventy-five apartments in the entire building. The returns on the total expenditure on the building, which was three hundred and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred dollars, it is estimated will be at least four and a half per cent." The rents will seem miraculous to those of you who have been following the prices given in this series of discourses. In this beautiful Victoria Square dwelling, with its large, shrub-encircled play-ground for children attached, light, airy, three-room tenements are furnished for one dollar and forty-four cents per week. For those containing two large rooms one dollar and eight cents a week is charged; while the one-room quarters are let at fifty-four cents a week.

Who among our rich men will lead off in some grand crusade of this sort? Another thing we want to do to Americanize these people, is to furnish them employment under conditions consistent with health, intelligence, and morality. Instead of the crowded sweat-shop, the moral atmosphere of which is as filthy as the physical, we must have factories conducted in the spirit of Christian civilization.

Let me tell you of a vision I had the other day as I sat meditating and dreaming in my study chair. I dreamed I was walking down the streets of an American city when I saw a large brick building which I might have thought was a factory except that there were white curtains at every window in the house. As I neared the door, I asked a passer-by what it was, and he astonished me by saying, "This is the great Christian factory." Being a little anxious to see what life in a really Christian factory would be like, I went in on a tour of investigation. There were several hundred employees in the factory, most of whom were young women. To my astonishment, I found bath-tubs in this factory, with an abundance of hot and cold water, linen towels, and toilet soap. Did one ever hear of such luxuries in a factory of any sort? In the girls' bath-room there were rugs under foot, the finishing was done in oak, the trimmings were nickel-plated, the sanitary arrangements were perfect, and everything was as bright and clean as it was possible to make it. Each employee was allowed thirty minutes for a bath, and if one was so fastidious as to need three-quarters of an hour, no comments were made. The structure was commodious and convenient, substantially built, and heated, lighted, and ventilated throughout according to the most improved system. Even the cellar was attractive in its completeness, from the steam-engine that operated the machinery of the building, to the culinary department where those who desired could purchase a noon-day lunch at actual cost of material. The cook in charge of the kitchen devoted her entire time to the work. Every day, tea, with milk and sugar, was supplied by the firm free of charge; oaten meal was furnished three days in the week at the same rate. Delicious soup was served at three cents a bowl. The entire floor was carefully cemented; it was light, warm, and clean, and there were tables and benches for those who lunched in the building. An hour was allowed at noon, and while all were expected to be on hand promptly at one o'clock, the girls living at a distance from the factory were thoughtfully permitted to leave a few minutes before twelve o'clock.

On the main floor goods were stored in the centre of the room, the remaining space being reserved for the pleasure and convenience of the employees. At one end of this spacious floor there was an improvised music-room, with a piano and window garden, where the girls could sing and sun themselves every noon. Opposite was an enclosed sanctum, divided into a reading and reception-room. Bright, soft rugs were scattered about. The reading-table was as well stocked with current literature as a club man's library table. The papers and periodicals were reserved for the exclusive use of the girls. An open fireplace was one of the attractive features of the reception-room, and there was a mantel-mirror, too—that means of grace so dear to the gentler sex.

The two upper floors contained the work-tables and machines. On entering these work-rooms one was struck by the neatness of the place. Everything seemed to have a white lining. The atmosphere was not only clean, but fresh and sweet. There were no rags, no dust, no fluff, no smell of dripping grease from over-hanging machinery. A special staff of men was constantly employed to look after the premises, and their vigilance was such as to anticipate the wear and tear. The abundance of light and sunshine would astonish and delight not only business people, but school commissioners as well. Each work-shop was the size of an entire floor, so that light was admitted from four sides of the building, the windows almost adjoining one another. The white curtains, which softened the light, gave the place a homelike appearance which was very pleasing. Another charm was the love of flowers. There were potted plants on every floor, and they were as green and lovely as if nourished by a practical florist. On making some inquiries, I found that Friday was pay-day, and that indirectly much good resulted from this thoughtful system. Not only did it give the hundreds of families the benefit of the early Saturday markets, but in a great measure did away with the credit-books, and, best of all, was instrumental in keeping the girls off the street Saturday night. No charges were imposed upon the operators. They did not have to buy thread, pay machine-rent, or replace broken needles. If an attachment was displaced, it was restored by the firm, and even the girls' scissors were kept sharpened at the expense of the employer. Hot and cold water, mirrors, towels, and soap were among the conveniences. Posted over the stationary wash basins was this request: "Please help with your forethought to keep things clean and nice. Any attention will oblige." This was signed by the firm. The work was so systematized, and the training so thorough, that the tyrannical forewoman and domineering foreman had no place in the establishment. The manager was the only person to whom the hands were accountable. Adjoining the factory was a pretty garden containing a pear-orchard, with arbors and seats, where the girls lunched in fine weather. Women as a class show the effects of good keeping, and these workers were not an exception. There were a great many pretty faces among them, and not one that betrayed "boss-fright" or time-terror. As a class they looked more like normal college students than factory hands. Compared with overworked, nerve-strained, anxious-faced girls in the sweat-shops, and indeed in most shops and factories, these trim, tidy-looking, cheerful and contented women seemed to me the very noblesse of the industrial world.

Ah! you may say, that is only an idle and visionary dream; and no doubt my critic of a few weeks ago, who thought I belonged to the most dangerous class in the community when I was describing the misery of the "white slaves of the Boston sweaters," would be ready to say that I am engaged in a scarcely less dangerous task in putting such ideal and impossible dreams into the heads of working-girls. But, dear sceptical friend, what I have been telling you is not a dream at all, but a heavenly reality that is going on in this modern work-a-day world, in the city of Newark, N. J., and I have merely been summarizing for you the report of Nell Nelson in the New York World, giving an account of the Christian experiment of Ferris Brothers' factory for the making of corset waists. I was at this point in my discourse on Thursday at half-past one o'clock, when I said to myself, "Isn't it a little hazardous to take all this for fact, even on the authority of a newspaper reporter? Will not a great many of your audience say it is only a pleasing fancy of a reporter's imagination?" So at three o'clock I was on the train for New York, and at eleven that evening I was in bed in a hotel in Newark.