Atlast we have come to the problem to which there has necessarily been incidental reference here and there, but which has otherwise bided its time. That these pages or any pages written by mortal hand in this generation can solve it, the writer doubts, its solution being inextricably involved with that of other social problems for which time is the chief key. State the question as we may, there is always a fresh presentation to be made, and replies are as various as the minds of the staters. It is the mistress with whom such presentation has thus far rested,—a mistress thorned beyond endurance by incompetence, dirt, waste, insubordination,—all the evils known to ignorant and presumptuous service. For such mistress, smarting from a sense of wrong, and hopeless and faithless as to remedies, the outlook is necessarily bounded by her own horizon. She listens with indignant contempt to the story of the thousands who choose their garrets and semi-starvation with independence, to the shelter and abundance of the homes in which they might be made welcome. Shemay even aver that any statement of their suffering is stupid sentimentality; the gush and maudlin melancholy of “humanitarian clergymen and newspaper reformers.”
For her, as for most of her order, in whom as yet no faculty for seeing both sides of a question has developed, there can be no reply save in words already spoken. “These women, working for wages that keep them always just above starvation point, have no power left to think beyond the need of the hour. They cannot stop, they dare not stop, to think of other methods of earning. They have no clothing in which they could obtain even entrance to an intelligence office. They have no knowledge that could make them servants even of the meanest order. They are what is left of untrained and hopelessly ignorant lives,” given over to suffering born in part from their ignorance; and for a large proportion of such cases there can be merely alleviation, and such slight bettering of conditions as would come from a system into which justice entered more fully.
With this army of incompetents we have at present nothing to do. Our interest lies in discovering what is at the bottom of the objection to domestic service; how far these objections are rational and to be treated with respect, and how they may be obviated. The mistress’s point of view we all know. We know, too, her presentation of objections as she fancies she has discovered them. What we do not know is theground taken by sensible, self-respecting girls, who have chosen trades in preference, and from whom full detail has been obtained as to the reasons for such choice. In listening to the countless stories of experiment in earning a living, the passage from one industry to another, and the uncertainties and despairs before the right thing had shown itself, the question has always been asked, “How did it happen that you did not try to get a place in some good family?”
The answers were as various as the characters of those who replied; some with indignation that they should be supposed capable of this degradation, but most of them thoughtfully and reasonably. In time they arranged themselves under heads, the occupations represented by the various respondents being over seventy. They were chiefly above the ordinary domestic in intelligence and education, their employments being of every order, from paper-box making to type-writing and stenography; but the trades predominated,—American being the nationality most largely represented, Irish born in this country ranking next, and German and a sprinkling of other nationalities following. These replies are precisely of the same nature as those given some time ago in Philadelphia during an investigation made by the head of one of the first guilds for working-women established in this country, objections being practically the same at whatever point they may be given. They were arranged under different heads and numbered in order.
In the present case it seems well to take the individual testimony, each girl whose verdict is chosen representing a class, and being really its mouthpiece.
First on the list stands Margaret M——, an American, twenty-three years old, and for five years in a paper-box factory. Seven others nodded their assent, or added a word here and there as she gave her view, two of them Irish-Americans who had had some years in the public schools.
“It’s freedom that we want when the day’s work is done. I know some nice girls, Bridget’s cousins, that make more money and dress better and everything for being in service. They’re waitresses, and have Thursday afternoon out and part of every other Sunday. But they’re never sure of one minute that’s their own when they’re in the house. Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings. That’s what I’ve heard from every nice girl that ever tried service. You’re never sure that your soul’s your own except when you are out of the house, and I couldn’t stand that a day. Women care just as much for freedom as men do. Of course they don’t get so much, but I know I’d fight for mine.”
“Women are always harder on women than men are,” said a fur-sewer, an intelligent American about thirty. “I got tired of always sitting, and took a place as chambermaid. The work was all right andthe wages good, but I’ll tell you what I couldn’t stand. The cook and the waitress were just common, uneducated Irish, and I had to room with one and stand the personal habits of both, and the way they did at table took all my appetite. I couldn’t eat, and began to run down; and at last I gave notice, and told the truth when I was asked why. The lady just looked at me astonished: ‘If you take a servant’s place, you can’t expect to be one of the family,’ she said. ‘I never asked it,’ I said; ‘all I ask is a chance at common decency.’ ‘It will be difficult to find an easier place than this,’ she said, and I knew it; but ease one way was hardness another, and she couldn’t see that I had any right to complain. That’s one trouble in the way. It’s the mixing up of things, and mistresses don’t think how they would feel in the same place.”
Third came an Irish-American whose mother had been cook for years in one family, but who had, after a few months of service, gone into a jute-mill, followed gradually by five sisters.
“I hate the very words ‘service’ and ‘servant,’” she said. “We came to this country to better ourselves, and it’s not bettering to have anybody ordering you round.”
“But you are ordered in the mill.”
“That’s different. A man knows what he wants, and doesn’t go beyond it; but a woman never knows what she wants, and sort of bosses you everlastingly.If there was such a thing as fixed hours it might be different, but I tell every girl I know, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go into service. You’ll always be prisoners and always looked down on.’ You can do things at home for them as belongs to you that somehow it seems different to do for strangers. Anyway, I hate it, and there’s plenty like me.”
“What I minded,” said a gentle, quiet girl, who worked at a stationer’s, and who had tried household service for a year,—“what I minded was the awful lonesomeness. I went for general housework, because I knew all about it, and there were only three in the family. I never minded being alone evenings in my own room, for I’m always reading or something, and I don’t go out hardly at all, but then I always know I can, and that there is somebody to talk to if I like. But there, except to give orders, they had nothing to do with me. It got to feel sort of crushing at last. I cried myself sick, and at last I gave it up, though I don’t mind the work at all. I know there are good places, but the two I tried happened to be about alike, and I sha’n’t try again. There are a good many would feel just the same.”
“Oh, nobody need to tell me about poor servants,” said an energetic woman of forty, Irish-American, and for years in a shirt factory. “Don’t I know the way the hussies’ll do, comin’ out of a bog maybe, an’ not knowing the names even, let alone the use, of halfthe things in the kitchen, and asking their twelve and fourteen dollars a month? Don’t I know it well, an’ the shame it is to ’em! but I know plenty o’ decent, hard-workin’ girls too, that give good satisfaction, an’ this is what they say. They say the main trouble is, the mistresses don’t know, no more than babies, what a day’s work really is. A smart girl keeps on her feet all the time to prove she isn’t lazy, for if the mistress finds her sitting down, she thinks there can’t be much to do and that she doesn’t earn her wages. Then if a girl tries to save herself or is deliberate, they call her slow. They want girls on tap from six in the morning till ten and eleven at night. ’Tisn’t fair. And then, if there’s a let-up in the work, maybe they give you the baby to see to. I like a nice baby, but I don’t like having one turned over to me when I’m fit to drop scrabbling to get through and sit down a bit. I’ve naught to say for the girls that’s breaking things and half doing the work. They’re a shameful set, and ought to be put down somehow; but it’s a fact that the most I’ve known in service have been another sort that stayed long in places and hated change. There’s many a good place too, but the bad ones outnumber ’em. Women make hard mistresses, and I say again, I’d rather be under a man, that knows what he wants. That’s the way with most.”
“I don’t see why people are surprised that we don’t rush into places,” said a shop-girl. “Our worldmay be a very narrow world, and I know it is; but for all that, it’s the only one we’ve got, and right or wrong, we’re out of it if we go into service. A teacher or cashier or anybody in a store, no matter if they have got common-sense, doesn’t want to associate with servants. Somehow you get a sort of smooch. Young men think and say, for I have heard lots of them, ‘Oh, she can’t amount to much if she hasn’t brains enough to make a living outside of a kitchen!’ You’re just down once for all if you go into one.”
“I don’t agree with you at all,” said a young teacher who had come with her. “The people that hire you go into kitchens and are not disgraced. What I felt was, for you see I tried it, that they oughtn’t to make me go into livery. I was worn out with teaching, and so I concluded to try being a nurse for a while. I found two hard things: one, that I was never free for an hour from the children, for I took meals and all with them, and any mother knows what a rest it is to go quite away from them, even for an hour; and the other was that she wanted me to wear the nurse’s cap and apron. She was real good and kind; but when I said, ‘Would you like your sister, Miss Louise, to put on cap and apron when she goes out with them?’ she got very red, and straightened up. ‘It’s a very different matter,’ she said; ‘you must not forget that in accepting a servant’s place you accept a servant’s limitations.’ That finished me. I loved the children, but I said, ‘If you have no other thought of what Iam to the children than that, I had better go.’ I went, and she put a common, uneducated Irish girl in my place. I know a good many who would take nurse’s places, and who are sensible enough not to want to push into the family life. But the trouble is that almost every one wants to make a show, and it is more stylish to have the nurse in a cap and apron, and so she is ordered into them.”
“I’ve tried it,” said one who had been a dressmaker and found her health going from long sitting. “My trouble was, no conscience as to hours; and I believe you’ll find that is, at the bottom, one of the chief objections. My first employer was a smart, energetic woman, who had done her own work when she was first married and knew what it meant, or you’d think she might have known. But she had no more thought for me than if I had been a machine. She’d sit in her sitting-room on the second floor and ring for me twenty times a day to do little things, and she wanted me up till eleven to answer the bell, for she had a great deal of company. I had a good room and everything nice, and she gave me a great many things, but I’d have spared them all if only I could have had a little time to myself. I was all worn out, and at last I had to go. There was another reason. I had no place but the kitchen to see my friends. I was thirty years old and as well born and well educated as she, and it didn’t seem right. The mistresses think it’s all the girls’ fault, but I’ve seenenough to know that women haven’t found out what justice means, and that a girl knows it, many a time, better than her employer. Anyway, you couldn’t make me try it again.”
“My trouble was,” said another, who had been in a cotton-mill and gone into the home of one of the mill-owners as chambermaid, “I hadn’t any place that I could be alone a minute. We were poor at home, and four of us worked in the mill, but I had a little room all my own, even if it didn’t hold much. In that splendid big house the servants’ room was over the kitchen,—hot and close in summer, and cold in winter, and four beds in it. We five had to live there together, with only two bureaus and a bit of a closet, and one washstand for all. There was no chance to keep clean or your things in nice order, or anything by yourself, and I gave up. Then I went into a little family and tried general housework, and the mistress taught me a great deal, and was good and kind, only there the kitchen was a dark little place and my room like it, and I hadn’t an hour in anything that was pleasant and warm. A mistress might see, you’d think, when a girl was quiet and fond of her home, and treat her different from the kind that destroy everything; but I suppose the truth is, they’re worn out with that kind and don’t make any difference. It’s hard to give up your whole life to somebody else’s orders, and always feel as if you was looked at over a wall like; but so itis, and you won’t get girls to try it, till somehow or other things are different.”
Last on the record came a young woman born in Pennsylvania in a fairly well-to-do farmer’s house.
“I like house-work,” she said. “There’s nothing suits me so well. We girls never had any money, nor mother either, and so I went into a water-cure near the Gap and stayed awhile. Now the man that run it believed in all being one family. He called the girls helpers, and he fixed things so’t each one had some time to herself every day, and he tried to teach ’em all sorts of things. The patients were cranky to wait on, but you felt as if you was a human being, anyhow, and had a chance. Well, I watched things, and I said it was discouraging, sure enough. I tried to do a square day’s work, but two-thirds of ’em there shirked whenever they could; half did things and then lied to cover their tracks. I was there nine months, and I learned better’n ever I knew before how folks ought to live on this earth. And I said to myself the fault wasn’t so much in the girls that hadn’t ever been taught; it was in them that didn’t know enough to teach ’em. A girl thought it was rather pretty and independent, and showed she was somebody, to sling dishes on the table, and never say ‘ma’am’ nor ‘sir,’ and dress up afternoons and make believe they hadn’t a responsibility on earth. They hadn’t sense enough to do anything first-rate, for nobody had ever put anydecent ambition into ’em. It isn’t to do work well; it’s to get somehow to a place where there won’t be any more work. So I say that it’s the way of living and thinking that’s all wrong; and that as soon as you get it ciphered out and plain before you that any woman, high or low, is a mean sneak that doesn’t do everything in the best way she can possibly learn, and that doesn’t try to help everybody to feel just so, why, things would stop being crooked and folks would get along well enough. Don’t you think so?”
How far the energetic speaker had solved the problem must be left to the reader, for whom there still certain unconsidered phases, all making part of the arraignment, scouted by those who are served, but more and more distinct and formidable in the mind of the server.
Thoughthe testimony given in the preceding chapter on this topic includes the chief objection to be made by the class of workers who would seem to be most benefited by accepting household service, there remain still one or two phases seldom mentioned, but forming an essential portion of the argument against it. They belong, not to the order we have had under consideration, but to that below it from which the mass of domestic servants is recruited, and with which the housekeeper must most often deal.
The phases encountered here are born of the conditions of life in the cities and large towns; and denied as they may be by quiet householders whose knowledge of life is bounded by their own walls, or walls enclosing neighbors of like mind, they exist and face at once all who look below the surface. The testimony of the class itself might be open to doubt. The testimony of the physicians whose work lies among them, or in the infirmaries to which they come, cannot be impugned. Shirk or deny facts aswe may, it is certain that in the great cities, save for the comparatively small proportion of quiet homes where old methods still prevail, household service has become synonymous with the worst degradation that comes to woman. Women who have been in service, and remained in it contentedly until marriage, unite in saying that things have so changed that only here and there is a young girl safe, and that domestic service is the cover for more licentiousness than can be found in any other trade in which women are at work.
Incredible as this statement at first appears, the statistics of hospitals and in infirmaries confirm it, and the causes are not far to seek. Household service has passed from the hands of Americans into those of the Irish first, and then a proportion of every European nation. So long as the supply came to us entirely from abroad we were comparatively safe. If the experience of the new arrival had been solely under thatched roof and on clay floors, at least sun could visit them and great chimneys gave currents of pure air, while simple food kept blood pure and gave small chance for unruly impulses to govern. But once with us demoralization began, and the tenement-house guaranteed sure corruption for every tenant. Even for the most decent there was small escape. To the children born in these quarters every inmost fact of human life was from the beginning a familiar story. Overcrowding, the impossibility of slightest privacy, the constant contact with the grossest sideof life, soon deaden any susceptibility and destroy every gleam of modesty or decency. In the lowest order of all rules an absolute shamelessness which conceals itself in the grade above, yet has no less firm hold of those who have come up in such conditions.
There are many exceptions, many well-fought battles against their power, but our concern at present is not with these but with facts as they stand recorded. Physician after physician has given in her testimony and one and all agree in the statement that open prostitution is for many merely the final step,—a mere setting the seal to the story of ruin and licentiousness that has always existed. The women who adopt this mode of life because of want of work or low wages are the smallest of minorities. The illegitimate children for whom the city must care are not from this source. Often the mother is a mere child who has been deceived and outraged, but far more often she has entered a family prepared to meet any advances, and often directly the tempter.
It is this state of things which makes many mothers say: “My girl shall never run such risks. I’ll keep her from them as long as I can;” and unsavory as the details will seem, their knowledge is an essential factor in the problem. The tenement-house stands to-day not only as the breeder of disease and physical degeneration for every inmate, but as equally potent in social demoralization for the class who ignore its existence. Out of these houses come hundreds uponhundreds of our domestic servants, whose influence is upon our children at the most impressible age, and who bring inherited and acquired foulness into our homes and lives. And if such make but the smallest proportion of those who serve, they are none the less powerful and most formidable agents in that blunting of moral perception which is a more and more apparent fact in the life of the day. The records from which such knowledge is gleaned are not accessible to the general public. They are formulated only by the physician, whose business is silence, and who gives only an occasional summary of what may be found in the sewer underlying the social life of great cities. Decorously hidden from view the foul stream flows on, rising here and there to the surface, but instantly covered by popular opinion, which pronounces such revelations disgusting and considers suppression synonymous with extermination.
Naturally this phase of things is confined chiefly to the great cities, but the virus is portable and its taint may be discovered even in the remote country. It is one of the many causes that have worked toward the degradation of this form of service, but it is so interwoven and integral a part of the present social structure that temporary destruction would seem the inevitable result of change. Yet change must come before the only class who have legitimate place in our homes will or can take such place. If different ideals had ruled among us; if ease and freedom fromobligation and “a good time” had not come to be the chief end of man to-day; if our schools gave any training from which boy or girl could go out into life with the best in them developed and ready for actual practical use,—this mass of undisciplined, conscienceless, reckless force would have been reduced to its lowest terms, and to dispose of the residuum would be an easy problem. As it is, we are at the mercy of the spirits we have raised, and no one word holds power to lay them. No axioms or theories of the past have any present application. It is because we cling to the old theories while diligently practising methods in absolute opposition to them, that the question has so complicated itself. We cannot go backward, but we can stop short and discover in what direction our path is tending and whether we are not wandering blindly in by-ways, when the public road is clear to see.
It is certain that many among the most intelligent working-women look longingly toward domestic service as something that might offer much more individual possibility of comfort and contentment than the trades afford. But save for one here and there who has chanced to find an employer who knows the meaning of justice as well as of human sympathy, the mass turn away hopeless of any change in methods. Yet reform among intelligent employers could easily be brought about were the question treated from the standpoint of justice, and the demand madean equally imperative and binding one for each side. The mistresses who command the best service are those who make rigorous demands, but keep their own side of the bargain as rigorously. They are few, for the American temperament is one of submission, varied by sudden bursts of revolt, and despairing return to a worse state than the first. A training-school school for mistresses is as much an essential as one for the servants. The conditions of modern life come more complicated with every year; and as simplification becomes for the many less and less possible, it is all the more vitally necessary to study the subject from the new standpoint, settle once for all how and why we have failed, and begin again on the new foundation.
Here then stands the arraignment of domestic service under its present conditions, given point by point as it has formulated itself to those who urged to turn to it. The mistresses’ side defines itself as sharply; but when all is said the two are one, the demand one and the same for both. Men who work for wages work a specified number of hours, and if they shirk or half fulfil their contract, find work taken from them. Were the same arrangement understood as equally binding in domestic service, thousands of self-respecting women would not hesitate to enter it. Family life cannot always move in fixed lines, and hours must often vary; but conscientious tally could be kept, and over-hours receive thepay they have earned. A conscience on both sides would be the first necessity; and it is quite certain that the master of the house would require education as decidedly as the mistress, woman’s work within home walls being regarded as something continuous, indefinable, and not worth formal estimate.
In spite of the enormous increase of wealth, the mass are happily what, for want of a better word, must be called middle class. But one servant or helper can usually be kept, and most often she is one who has used our kitchens as kindergartens, adding fragments of training as she passed from one to the other, ending often as fairly serviceable and competent. Sure of her place she becomes tyrant, and nothing can alter this relation but the appearance upon the scene of organized trained labor, making a demand for absolute fairness of treatment and giving it in return. Once certain that the reign of incompetence was over, the present order of servers would make haste to seek training-schools, or accept the low wages which would include personal training from the mistress, promotion being conditioned upon faithful obedience to the new order.
What are the stipulations which every self-respecting girl or woman has the right to make? They are short and simple. They are absolutely reasonable, and their adoption would be an education to every household which accepted them:—
1. A definition of what a day’s work means, andpayment for all over-time required, or certain hours of absolute freedom guaranteed, especially where the position is that of child’s nurse.
2. A comfortably warmed and decently furnished room, with separate beds if two occupy it, and both decent place and appointments for meals.
3. The heaviest work, such as carrying coal, scrubbing pavements, washing, etc., to be arranged for if this is asked, with a consequent deduction in the wages.
4. No livery if there is feeling against it.
5. The privilege of seeing friends in a better part of the house than the kitchen, and security from any espionage during such time, whether the visitors are male or female. This to be accompanied by reasonable restrictions as to hours, and with the condition that work is not to be neglected.
6. Such a manner of speaking to and of the server as shall show that there is no contempt for housework, and that it is actually as respectable as other occupations.
Were such a schedule as this printed, framed, and hung in every kitchen in the land, and its provisions honestly met, household revolution and anarchy would cease, and the whole question settle itself quietly and once for all. And this in spite of a thousand inherent difficulties known to every housekeeper, but which would prove self-adjusting so soon as it was learned that service had found a rational basis. At present,with the majority of mistresses, it is simply unending struggle to get the most out of the unwilling and grudging server, hopelessly unreasonable and giving warning on faintest provocation. Yet these very women, turning to factory life, where fixed and inexorable law rules with no appeal, submit at once and become often skilled and capable workers. It is certain that domestic service must learn organization as every other form of industry has learned it, and that mistresses must submit to something of the same training that is needed by the maid. Nor need it be feared that putting such service on a strictly business basis will destroy such kindliness as now helps to make the relation less intolerable. On the contrary, with justice the foundation and a rigorous fulfilment of duty on both sides will come a far closer tie than exists save in rarest instances, and homes will regain a quality long ago vanished from our midst. Such training will be the first step toward the co-operation which must be the ultimate solution of many social problems.
It has failed in many earlier attempts because personal justice was lacking; but even one generation of sustained effort to simplify conditions would insure not only a different ideal for those who think at all, but the birth of something better for every child of the Republic.
For the individual standing alone, hampered by many cares and distracted over the whole householdproblem, action may seem impossible. But if the most rational members of a community would band together, send prejudice and tradition to the winds, and make a new declaration of independence for the worker, it is certain that the tide would turn and a new order begin. Till such united, concerted action can be brought about there is small hope of reform, and it can come only through women. Dismiss sentiment. Learn to look at the thing as a trade in which each seeks her own advantage, and in which each gains the more clearly these advantages are defined. It is a hard relation. It demands every power that woman can bring to bear upon it. It is an education of the highest faculties she owns. It means a double battle, for it is with ourselves that the fight begins. Liberty can only come through personal struggle. It is easy to die for it, but to live for it, to deserve it, to defend it forever is another and a harder matter. Still harder is it to know its full meaning and what it is that makes the battle worth fighting. Union to such ends will be slow, but it must come:—
“Freedom is growth and not creation:One man suffers, one man is free.One brain forges a constitution,But how shall the million souls be won?Freedom is more than a revolution—He is not free who is free alone.”
Is this the word of a dreamer whose imagination holds the only work of reconstruction, and whosehands are powerless to make the dream reality? On the contrary, many years of experience in which few of the usual troubles were encountered, added to that of others who had thought out the problem for themselves, have demonstrated that reform is possible. Precisely such conditions as are here specified have been in practical operation for many years. The homes in which they have ruled have had the unfailing devotion of those who served, and the experiment has ceased to come under that head, and demonstrated that order and peace and quiet mastery of the day’s work may still be American possessions. Count this imperfect presentation then as established fact for a few, and ask why it is not possible to make it so for the many.
Thelong quest is over. It ends; and I turn at last from those women, whose eyes still follow me, filled with mute question of what good may come. Of all ages and nations and creeds, all degrees of ignorance and prejudice and stupidity; hampered by every condition of birth and training; powerless to rise beyond them till obstacles are removed,—the great city holds them all, and in pain and want and sorrow they are one. The best things of life are impossible to them. What is worse, they are unknown as well as unattainable. If the real good of life must be measured by the final worth of the thing we make or get by it, what worth is there for or in them? The city holds them all,—“the great foul city,—rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,—a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore.”
The prosperous have no such definition, nor do they admit that it can be true. For the poor, it is the only one that can have place. We pack them away in tenements crowded and foul beyond anythingknown even to London, whose “Bitter Cry” had less reason than ours; and we have taken excellent care that no foot of ground shall remain that might mean breathing-space, or free sport of child, or any green growing thing. Grass pushes its way here and there, but for this army it is only something that at last they may lie under, never upon. There is no pause in the march, where as one and another drops out the gap fills instantly, every alley and by-way holding unending substitutes. It is not labor that profiteth, for body and soul are alike starved. It is labor in its basest, most degrading form; labor that is curse and never blessing, as true work may be and is. It blinds the eyes. It steals away joy. It blunts all power whether of hope or faith. It wrecks the body and it starves the soul. It is waste and only waste; nor can it, below ground or above, hold fructifying power for any human soul.
Here then we face them,—ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre,—and yet no count of such indictment alters our responsibility toward them. Rather it multiplies it in always increasing ratio. For it is our own system that has made these lives worthless, and sooner or later we must answer how it came, that living in a civilized land they had less chance than the heathen to whom we send our missionaries, and upon whose occasional conversions we plume ourselves as if thus the Kingdom of Heaven were made wider. If it is true that for many only alittle alleviation is possible, a little more justice, a little better apportionment of such good as they can comprehend, it is also true that something better is within the reach of all.
How then shall we define it, and what possibility of alteration for either lives or conditions lies before us? Nothing that can be of instant growth; and here lies the chief discouragement, since as a people we demand instantaneousness, and would have seed, flower, and fruit at the same moment. Admit patience, capacity to wait, and to work while waiting, as the first term of the equation, and the rest arrange themselves.
For the greater part of social reformers, co-operation has stood as the initial and most essential step, as the fruit that could be plucked full-grown; and experience in England would seem to have demonstrated the belief as true. It is the American inability to wait that has proved it untrue for us, and until very lately made failure our only record; but there is a deeper reason than a merely temperamental one. The abolition of the apprentice system, brought about by the greed of master and men alike, has abolished training and slow, steady preparation for any trade. An American has been regarded as quick enough and keen enough to take in the essential features of a calling, as it were, at a glance, and apprenticeship has been taken as practically an insult to national intelligence. Law has kept pace with such conviction, andthus the door has been shut in the face of all learners, and foreigners have supplied our skilled workmen and work-women. The groundwork of any better order lies, if not in a return to the apprentice system, then in a training from the beginning, which will give to eye and hand the utmost power of which they are capable. Industrial education is the foundation, and until it has in its broadest and deepest sense become the portion of every child born on American soil, that child has missed its birthright.
With the many who accept it, it stands merely as an added capacity to make money, and if taken in its narrowest application this is all that it can do. Were this all, it would be simply an added injustice toward the degeneration that money-making for the mere sake of money inevitably brings. But at its best, perfected as it has been by patient effort on the part of a few believers, it is far more than this. Added power to earn comes with it, but there comes also a love of the work itself, such as has had no place since the days when the great guilds gave joyfully their few hours daily to the cathedrals, whose stones were laid and cemented in love and hope, and a knowledge of the beauty to come, that long ago died out of any work the present knows. The builders had small book knowledge. They could be talked down by any public-school child in its second or third year. But they knew the meaning of beauty and order and law; and this trinity stands to-day, and will stand formany a generation to come, as an ideal to which we must return till like causes work again to like ends. The child who could barely read saw beauty on every side, and took in the store of ballad and tradition that gave life to labor. We have parted with all this wilfully. To the Puritan all beauty that hand of man could create was of the devil, and thus we represent a consecrated ugliness, any departure from which is even now, by some conscientious souls, regarded with suspicion.
The child, then, who can be made to understand that beauty and order and law are one, has a new sense born in him. Life takes on a new aspect, and work a new meaning. But the fourteen weeks per year of education, at present required by our law as it stands in its application to children who must work, has no power to bring such result. It begins in the kindergarten, from which the poorest child takes home, even to the tenement-house, something strong enough, when growth has come, to abolish the tenement-house forever. No man who works to these ends has gauged possibilities more wisely than Felix Adler, whose school shows us something not yet attained by the many who, partially accepting his methods, pronounce his theories dangerous and destructive to what must be held sacred. However this may be, he and his band of co-workers have proved, in seven years of unceasing struggle against heavy odds, that a development is possible even forthe tenement-house child, that reconstructs the entire view of life and makes possible the end for which all industrial training is but the preparation. It is in such training that children, rich or poor, best learn the demand bound up in living and working together, and find in the end that co-operation is its natural out-growth. There is no renunciation of the home or destruction of the truest home life. There is simply the abolition of competition as any necessary factor in human progress, and the placing of the worker beyond its power to harm.
Thus far we have left the bettering of social conditions chiefly to the individual, and any hint of State interference carries with it the opprobrium of socialism. Yet more and more for those who are unterrified by names, the best in socialism offers itself as the sole way of escape from monopolies and the stupidities and outrages of the present system. No one panacea of any reformer fits the case or can alter existing conditions. Only what man’s own soul sees as good, and wills to possess, is of faintest value to him. No attempt at co-operation can help till the worker sees its power and use, and is willing to sacrifice where sacrifice is necessary, to work and to wait in patience. Such power is born in the industrial school in its largest sense,—the school that trains heart and mind as well eye and hand, and makes the child ready for the best work its measure of power can know. This we can give by State or by individualaid, as the case may be, and every ward in the city should own a sufficient number to include every child within it. A check upon emigration would seem an imperative demand,—not prevention, but some clause which might act to lessen the garbage-heaps dumped upon our shores. Pauperism and disease have no rights as emigrants, and eliminating these would make dealing with mere poverty a much more manageable matter.
The schools exist, and, while painfully inadequate in number, demonstrate what may be done in the future. Co-operation even for this hasty people is almost equally demonstrated, as will be plain to those who read two recent publications of the American Economic Association: “Co-operation in a Western City,” by Albert Shaw, and “Co-operation in New England,” by Edward W. Bemis. Minneapolis is the centre of the facts given in the first-mentioned pamphlet, which is also the more valuable of the two, not in execution but merely because it records a movement which has ceased to be experimental; as the little history includes every failure as well as the final success, and thus stands as the best argument yet made for the cause.
Industrial education for the child of to-day; co-operation as the end to be attained by the worker into which the child will grow,—in these two factors is bound up much of the problem. They will not touch many whose miserable lives are recorded inthese pages, but they will forever end any chance of another generation in like case. There are workers who think, who are being educated by sharp conflict with circumstances, and who look beyond their own present need to the future. These men and women, crowded to the wall by the present system, are searching eagerly, not as mere anarchists and destroyers, but as those who believe that something better than destruction is possible.
It is these workers for whom the path must be made plain, and to whom we are most heavily responsible. And this brings me to the final point bound up indissolubly with the two already defined,—a change in our own ideals. Such change must come before any school can accomplish its best work, and till it has at least begun neither school nor system has lasting power. In these months of search in which women of all ages and grades have given in their testimony,—from the girl of fourteen earning her two or three dollars a week in the bag-factory or as cash-girl, to the woman stitching her remnant of life into the garments that by and by her more fortunate sisters will find on the bargain counter,—I discover not alone their ignorance and stupidity and grossness and wilful blindness, but behind it an ignorance and stupidity no less dense upon which theirs is founded,—our own. The visible wretchedness is so appalling, the need for instant relief so pressing, that it is small wonder that no power remains to look beyond themoment, or to disentangle one’s self from the myriad conflicting claims, and ask the real meaning of the demand. Mile after mile of the fair islands once the charm of the East River and the great Sound beyond are covered by lazar-houses,—the visible signs in this great equation that fills the page of to-day; the problem of human crime and disease and wretchedness complicating itself with every addition, and no nearer solution than when the city was but a handful of houses and poverty yet unknown.
We have made attempts here and there to limit the breeding ground; to offer less fruitful soil to the spawn increasing with such frightful rapidity, and demanding with every year fresh reformatories, larger asylums and hospitals, more and more machinery of alleviation. Yet the conviction strengthens that even when the tenement-house of to-day is swept aside, and improved homes with decent sanitary conditions have taken their place, that the root of the evil is even then untouched, and that it lies not alone in their lives, but in our own. And so, as final word, I say to-day to all women who give their lives to beneficence, and plan ceaselessly and untiringly for better days, that no beneficence can alter, no work of our hands or desire of our hearts bring the better day we desire, till the foundations have been laid in something less shifting than the sands on which we build.
The mission of alleviation, of protection, of care forthe foulest and lowest of lives, has had its day. It is time that this mass of effort stirred against its perpetual reproduction, its existence, its ever more and more shameless demands. An improved home goes far toward making these tendencies less strong; it may even diminish the number of actual transgressors; but what home, no matter how well kept, has or will have power to alter the fact that in them thousands of women must still slave for a pittance that borders always on that life limit fixed by the political economists as the vanishing point in the picture of modern life? Sunlight and air may take the place of the foulness now reigning in the dens that many of them know as homes; but will either sun or air shorten hours or raise wages, or alter the fact that not one in a thousand of these women but has grounded her whole pitiful life on a delusion,—a delusion for which we are responsible?
Year by year in the story of the Republic, labor has taken lower and lower place. The passion for getting on, latent in every drop of American blood, has made money the sole symbol of success, and freedom from hand-labor the synonyme of happiness. The mass of illiterate, unenlightened emigrants pouring in a steady stream through Castle Garden have become our hands, and, as hands dependent on the heads of others, have fallen into the same category as the slaves, whose possession brought infinitely more degradation to owners than to owned. It is the storyof every civilized nation before its fall,—this exploitation of labor, this degradation of the worker; and the story of hopeless decay and collapse must be ours also, if different ideals do not rise to fill the place of this Golden Calf to which all have bent the knee. There is not a girl old enough to work at all who does not dream of a possible future in which work will cease and ease and luxury take its place. The boy content with a trade, the man or woman accepting simple living and its limitations contentedly, is counted fool. To get money, and always more and more money, is the one ambition; and in this mad rush toward the golden fountain, gentle virtues are trampled under foot, and men count no armor of honest thought worth wearing unless it be fringed with bullion. The shop-girl must have her cotton velvet and her glass substitutes for diamonds. The lines of caste are drawn as sharply with her as in the ascending grades through which she hopes to pass. Labor is curse; never the blessing that it may bear when accepted man’s chief good, and used as developing, not as destroying power.
Never till men see and believe that the fortune made by mere sharpness and unscrupulousness, the fruit not of honest labor but of pure speculation, is a burning disgrace to its owner, a plague-spot in civilization, shall we be able to convince girl or woman that labor is honorable, and better gains possible than any involved in merely getting on. Never till thisfurious fight for success, this system of competition which kills all regard for the individual, demanding only a machine capable of so much net product,—never till these and all methods of like nature have ceased to have place, or right to existence, can we count ourselves civilized or hope to better the conditions that now baffle us. No church, no mission, no improved home, no guild or any other form of mitigation means anything till the whole system of thought is reconstructed, and we come to some sense of what the eternal verities really are.
It is easy for a woman to be kind and long-suffering, but the women who can be just to themselves, as well as to others, we can count on our fingers. Yet justice is the one demand in this life of to-day, and not one of us who shrinks and shudders at the thought of what women-workers are enduring but has it in her power to lessen the great sum of wretchedness; to begin for some one the work of education into just thinking and just living. Sweeping changes may not be possible. But beginning is always possible; and not a woman capable of thinking but has power by the simple force of example to lay the corner-stone of the new temple, fairer than any yet known to mortal eyes. If there is doubt for this generation of working-women toiling in blindest ignorance, it rests with us to lessen the doubt for the next, and to make it impossible in that better day for which we labor. Not one of us but can ask,“What is the source of the income which gives me ease? Is it possible for me to reconstruct my own life in such fashion that it shall mean more direct and personal relation to the worker? How can I bring more simplicity, less conventionality, more truth and right living into home and every relation of life?”
I write these final words with all deference to the noble women whose lives have been given to good work, and many of whom long ago settled these questions practically for themselves. But for many of us there has been simply passive acceptance of all present conditions, without a question as to how or why they have come. It is because I believe that with us is the power to remedy every one if we will, that I appeal to women to-day. I write not as anarchist; not as declaimer against the rights of property, but as believer in the full right to ownership of all legitimately acquired property. I believe it the order of life, of any life that would hold good work of whatever nature, that enough should be acquired to make sharp want or eating care and perplexity impossible. But it is certain that even for the most unselfish of us there is an exaggerated estimate of the value of money,—an involuntary and inevitable truckling to the one who has most,—and that, no matter what our teaching may be, the force of every act and tendency makes against it. And there can be no retracing of steps that have for generations turned in the wrongdirection. The very breath we draw on this American soil is poisoned by the foulness about us, and about us by our own act and choice. We have degraded labor till there is no lower depth, and not one but many generations must pass before these masses over whose condition we puzzle can find their feet in the path that means any real progress.
Ask first, then, not what shall we do for these women, but what shall we do for ourselves? How shall we learn to know what are the real things? How shall we come to love them and cleave to them, and hold no life worth living that admits sham or compromise, or believes the mad luxury of this generation anything but blighting curse and surest destruction? Till we know this we have learned nothing, and are forever not helpers, but hinderers, in the great march that our blunders and stupidities only check for the time. For the word is forever onward, and even the blindest soul must one day see that if he will not walk by free choice in the path of God, he will be driven into it with whips of scorpions, made thus to know what part was given him to fill, and what judgment waits him who has chosen blindness.
University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.