CHAPTER IIIFINDING STEADY WORK
No. — Blue Island Avenue, Chicago, Ill.,
December 22, 1891.
That night when Clark and I reached the head of the staircase which descends to the basement of the station-house we found the way blocked by men. We thought at first that a prisoner was being booked, but a second glance revealed the fact that the door of iron grating was wide open. With his back against it stood an officer. The lodgers were passing him in slow order, and, as they filed by, the policeman held each in sharp examination for a moment. Soon I could see him clearly. He stood, obstructing the exit from the stairs, a straight, massive figure well on to two hundred and fifty pounds. A side-view was toward us, and I took delight in the clean-shaven face with the well-chiselled Grecian profile, the eye deep-set and widening to the upward lift of the lashes, and the dark, abundant hair rising in short, crisp curls from under the pressure of his cap-rim.
He was putting the men through a catechism respecting their nationalities, their homes and occupations, and their motives in coming to Chicago. Beside him stood two men, the elder a man past middle life, of sober, dignified appearance, and with an air of philosophical interest in what he saw. The younger was a callow youth, just grown to manhood, and he may have been the other’s son. They were out “slumming,” evidently, and the officer had been detailed as their guide. Their purpose may have been a good one, but the boy’s face, as I watched it, seemed to me to show plainly the marks of an unwholesome curiosity. And certainly as they stood there in well-dressed, well-fed comfort, eying at leisure, as though it were exhibited for their diversion, this company of homeless, ragged, needful men, there was to my mind a deliberate insult in the attitude sharper than the sting of a blow in the face. I thought at first that I might be alone in feeling this, until I heard a man behind me say, as the cause of the delay became clear to him:
Two well dressed men and two poorly dressed men are looking at a policeman who appears to be explaining something.HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO.
HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO.
HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO.
“Who is them jays, and what business have they inspectin’ us?”
On the step below me was as good a vagrant type as the slowly moving line on the staircase disclosed. I could not see his face, but I could guess at its effect from the dark, bristling, unkempt beard that sprouted in tangled, wiry masses from his cheeks and throat, and the heavy, cohering hair that lay long and thick about his ears and on his neck. There was an unnatural corpulence about the figure, the reality of which was belied by the lean, sharp lines that appeared beneath a bulging collar and in the emaciated arms that were red, and raw, and almost bare below the elbows, where the ragged sleeves hung in fraying ribbons.
The obesity was purely artificial. The tramp had on three flannel shirts, at least, besides several heavy waistcoats and two pairs of trousers and as many coats, with a possibility of there being three. The outer garments were quaint mosaics of patches, positively ingenious in their interlacing adherence to one another and in their rude preservation of original outlines of dress. From him came the pungent reek of bad whiskey and stale tobacco.
It was as though the man stood clothed in outward and visible signs of unseen realities, enveloped in the rigid habit of his own wrong-doing, draped in the mystery of inherited tendencies, and cloaked in the stern facts of a hard environment. And yet, as beneath the filthy outer covering there was a human being, so under these veiling, unseen vestures was a man, a living soul created by the Almighty.
I could hear him muttering gruffly to himself as he slowly descended to his turn at the foot of the steps.
“Well, Weary, where are you from? A hobo from Hoboville, I guess,” and the officer’s voice rang strong and clear up the staircase to the dim landing, where stood the waiting line of men.
The two slummers laughed aloud.
“From Maine,” said the tramp. The voice came hoarse and thin and broken-winded from a throat eaten out by disease.
“Well, you’re a rare one, if you’re a Yankee. But what brought you to Chicago?”
“Lookin’ for work at the World’s Fair.”
“You lie, you lazy loafer. The last thing you’re looking for is work. You all tell that World’s Fair lie. There’s been as many of you in Chicago every winter for the last ten years as there is this winter.”
The man was stung.
“I’ve as good a right here as you,” he said.
“You have, have you!” cried the officer in quick rejoinder, but with no loss of temper. “Look at me, you filthy hobo,” he added, drawing himself to his full, imposing height. “I’m a police officer. I’ve held my job for eleven years, and got my promotions. I’m earning eighty dollars a month, do you see? Now go down there where you belong,” and he pointed imperiously to the far end of the corridor.
My turn came next.
“Here’s another whiskers,” announced the officer in explanation to his charges; “same kind, only younger and newer to the business.” And then to me, “Where are you from?” he said.
I replied with some inanity in mock German. “Oh, he’s a Dutchman. We get a few of them. But they’re mostly older men, and kind of moody, and they tramp alone a good bit. Can’t you talk English?”
I said something in very bad French.
“Oh, I guess he’s a Frenchy. That’s very uncommon——”
I interrupted his information with a line from Virgil, spoken with an inflection of inquiry.
“He may be a Dago, or a—ah——” he hesitated.
I broke in with a sentence in Greek.
“Or a Russian,” concluded the officer.
I thought that I could mystify him finally, and so I pronounced a verse from Genesis in Hebrew. But he was equal to the emergence.
“I’ve got it,” he exclaimed, with a note of exultation; “he’s a Sheeny!” And free to go I walked down the corridor, feeling that I had come rather badly out of that encounter.
None of us, I think, resented much the action of the officer. The policemen understand us perfectly, and in a certain broad, human sense we know them for our friends. I have been much impressed with this quality of naturalbonhomiein the relation of the police officers to the vagrant and criminal classes. It seems to be the outcome of sturdy common sense and genuine knowledge and human sympathy. It would be difficult, I fancy, seriously to deceive an average officer of good experience. He may not know his man personally in every case, but he knows his type, and he takes his measure with admirable accuracy. He is not far misled by either his virtue or his vice. He knows him for a human being, even if he be a vagrant or a criminal, and he has come by practical experience to a fair acquaintance with human limitations in these spheres of life.
The sympathy of which I have spoken is conspicuously innocent of sentimentality. It comes from a saner source, and is of a hardier fibre. Unfortunately it lays open a way of corruption to corrupt men on the force, but it is the basis, too, of high practical efficiency in the difficult task of locating crime and keeping it within control. And it has another value little suspected, perhaps. I have met more than one workingman at work who owed his job to the friendly aid of a policeman, who had singled him out from the ranks of the unemployed as being worthy of his help. And this sort of timely succor is bounded, I judge, only by the limits of opportunity. Certainly I shall never forget the kindness of an officer who had evidently grown familiar with me on the streets, and who to my great surprise stopped me suddenly one day with the question:
“Ain’t yous got a job yet?”
“No,” I said, as I stood looking up in deep admiration of his height and breadth and ruddy, wholesome face and generous Irish brogue.
“Well, that is hard luck,” he went on. “There isn’t many jobs ever at this season of the year, but just yous come around this way now and again, and I’ll tell yous, if I hears of anything.”
That was only a day or two before I found work, and when I had a chance to tell him of my success, his pleasure seemed as genuine as my own.
Sunday morning was all that Clark and I could wish. To the pallor of the earliest dawn was added a soft, white muffling of snow. It lay almost untracked over the filthy streets and upon the pavements, and in dainty cones it capped the fence-palings, and roofed in pure white the sheds and flat-cars in the railway station yard.
Clark and I walked rapidly across Wabash Avenue, then south to Twentieth Street, and then east again across Michigan and Indiana to Prairie Avenue. Here we were in the midst of a wealthy residence quarter. Most hopefully we wandered about in anxious waiting for some signs of life. From the first house at which we could apply we were turned away with the assurance that there was a man on the place whose duties included the cleaning of the pavements, and that, therefore, our services were not needed. We had expected this to be the case in the majority of instances; it was of the possible exception that we were in search. Soon we began to fear that there were no exceptions. Our spirits had fallen low under repeated refusals, when suddenly they rose with a bound, when we finally got a pavement to clean, and twenty-five cents each in payment.
The temptation to quit at once and get something to eat was strong, for the swallow of coffee and piece of bread at the station-house had not gone far toward satisfying an appetite which was of twenty-four hours’ growth. But then in another hour or two all further chance of work like this would be gone, and so we stuck at it. Our reward was almost instant.
Not only were we given a job at sweeping snow, and paid another quarter each for it, but we were asked whether we had breakfasted, and were invited to a meal in the kitchen. I think that the cook thoroughly enjoyed feeding us, we did such ample justice to her fare. After two large bowls of steaming porridge, we began on omelettes and beefsteak and crisp potatoes and fresh bread, drinking the while great quantities of coffee, not the flat, bitter, diluted wash of the cheap restaurants, but the hot, creamy, fragrant beverage which tones one for the day.
Two men are sitting and eating at a dining room table. A smiling woman watches over them.I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US.
I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US.
I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US.
We had little time to talk, and very selfishly I left our end of the conversation wholly to Clark. The cook drew from him some of the facts of our position, and the further fact of our having been so long without food. This made her very indignant, not at us, but at the existing order of things.
“There should be a law,” she said, emphatically, “a law to give a job to every decent man that’s out of work.” Then, with the sweet facility of feminine remedy, “And another law,” she added, “to keep all them I-talians from comin’ in and takin’ the bread out of the mouths of honest people. They ain’t no better than heathens anyway, and they do tell me that they’ll work for what a Christian dog wouldn’t live on. Why, there’s me own cousin as come over from County Down a month ago last Tuesday, and he ain’t got a job yet, and I be obliged to support him, and all on account of them unclean I-talians.”
There seemed to be no end to our good luck that morning. After a right royal breakfast we got still another belated pavement to clean, and when we had finished that our joint earnings made the sumptuous total of one dollar and fifty cents, and we were not hungry.
It was a delightful walk back to the familiar lodging-house, where we paid for a night’s lodging in advance, and so secured immediate access to the washing and cleaning facilities of the establishment.
When we set forth again Clark looked fairly trim. His clothes were well brushed and his boots were clean. He had been shaven, and his face glowed with healthful exercise and the effects of nourishing, sustaining food. We had been in conversation on the subject of going to church. Clark opposed it warmly; besides, he had another plan. There were certain foremen whom he was bent on seeing in the unoccupied quiet of Sunday, in relation to the matter of a possible job.
“And I don’t take no stock in church, anyway,” he explained. “Fellows like us ain’t expected there, and we ain’t wanted. If you ain’t dressed in the style, you’re different from everybody else that’s there, and there ain’t no fun in that. And if you do go, what do you hear? Sometimes a preacher talks sense, and makes things reasonable to you, but most of them talks rot, that you don’t believe nor they either. I’d sooner read Tom Paine than hear all the preachers in this town. He talks to you straight, in a way you can understand.”
I pleaded my knowledge of a preacher who would talk to us as “straight” as Tom Paine, but to no purpose, for there remained the question of dress. Then I urged our going to mass, where we should not be embarrassed by our singularity; but this plea met with no favor at all, and I was obliged to go alone to church, and did not see Clark again until we met late in the evening at the lodging-house.
It was snowing fast at the end of the service-hour, giving high promise of abundant work in the morning. On the strength of it I ate a fifteen-cent dinner with a twofold feeling of satisfaction. Then I began a diligent search for the place of meeting of the Socialists. Sunday afternoon, I had learned, was their time of meeting. A knowledge of the place was wanting, but only because it had not occurred to me to look for an announcement of it in the newspapers of the day before. And this was wholly indicative of my general frame of mind in the connection. My preconceptions were strong. I had vision of a bare, dimly lighted room in the far recess of an unfrequented building, a room reached by dusty stairs and long, dark corridors, closely guarded by sentries, whose duty was to demand the countersign from those who entered and to give warning of danger in an emergency, so that the inmates might escape by secret passages to the street.
I had made frequent inquiries of the men whom I met, and it was from one of these that I learned that the time was Sunday afternoon; but none of them knew the place nor seemed to take the smallest interest in the matter. I thought that a policeman might be able to put me on the track of the meeting, if he chose, but then I feared that there were even chances that he would “run me in” as a revolutionary, upon hearing my request. I concluded that if I should be so fortunate as to find the place, it would be by some happy chance; and that if I gained admission, it would be by a happier one, due largely to my rough appearance.
I pictured this rude hall thronged with men, grizzled, bearded men, with eyes aflame and hair dishevelled, listening in high excitement to leaders whose inflammatory speeches lashed them into fury against all established order. Curiosity kindled to liveliest interest under the free play of imagination. In my eagerness I grew bolder. Repeatedly I stopped workingmen upon the street, and asked to be directed. No one knew, until I chanced upon a man who had a vague suspicion that the Socialists met in a hall over a saloon somewhere in West Lake Street.
I crossed the river and passed under the dark-steel framework of the elevated railway. The snow was falling through the still, sooty air in heavy flakes, which clung to every exposed surface, and turned the street-slime into a dark, granular slush. It seemed to be a region of warehouses and cheap shops, but chiefly of saloons; scarcely a soul was to be seen on the pavements; and brooding over the long, deserted street was the decorous quiet of Sunday.
I quickened my pace to overtake three men in front of me. Before I caught up with them they disappeared through a door which opened on the pavement. It was that of a saloon. The shades were drawn, and the place, like all the others of its kind, had every appearance of being closed for the day. I tried the door, and, finding it unlocked, followed the men inside. They had already mingled in a group of workingmen who sat about a large stove in the far corner of the bar-room, drinking beer and talking quietly.
They did not notice me until the one of whom I inquired appealed to the others for some knowledge of the question. Then there was a moment of passing the inquiry from one to another, until a good-looking young workman spoke up.
“Why, I know,” he said; “I’ve just come from there. It’s over in Waverley Hall, corner of Lake and Clark.”
“Will you help me to get into the meeting?” I asked. “I am a stranger here, and I should very much like to go.”
“There ain’t no trouble,” he responded; “you just go up two flights of steps from the street, and walk right in.”
It was even as he said. At the level of the first landing was a restaurant, with a strikingly fine portrait of Burns near the entrance. My curiosity was at a high pitch when I reached the second landing. It was ill-lighted, and it opened first into an almost dark store-room, in whose deep recesses were great stacks of chairs. But a single step to the right brought one to the wide-open door of Waverley Hall and a company of Socialists in full session. A man sat beside the door with a small table before him, on which in neat array were some attractive paper editions for sale. My eye fell in passing upon “The Fabian Essays,” and Thorold Rogers’s “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” and an English version of Schäffle’s “Quintessence of Socialism.”
“May I go in?” I asked of the man.
“Oh, certainly,” he replied. “Walk right in, and take any vacant seat you choose.”
I thanked him, and walked up a central aisle with rows of seats on either side, where sat from two or three hundred men and a few women. By the time that I had found a seat half way to the daïs, at the far end of the hall, where sat the chairman of the meeting, I was already deeply interested in the speech of a man who stood facing the company from the side, with his back against the wall. Slender and of medium height, with sandy hair slightly touched with gray, with an expression of ready alertness on his intelligent face, he was speaking fluently in good, well articulated English, and with deep conviction his evident inspiration.
“What we want is education,” he was saying; “an education which will enlighten the capitalistic class as well as our own. We serve no useful end in denouncing the capitalists. They, like us, are simply a product of the competitive system, and individually many of them are good and generous men. But we shall be furthering the cause of Socialism in trying to show them their share of the evils under which we all live. How that, for example, owing to the present organization of society, in spite of all the safeguards which entrench private property, not even a capitalist can feel assured that his children or grandchildren may not be beggars upon the streets.”
Such views, it seemed to me, at least suggested some catholicity of mind in “the Peddler,” as the speaker afterward declared himself to be. When he took his seat several men were on their feet at once, appealing to the chair, and I saw that the meeting was well in hand, for the chairman instantly singled out one for the privilege of the floor, addressing him politely by name, prefixing, however, the title “Comrade,” much as “Citizen” was used in the French Revolution and after.
The well-grown muscular, intelligent workingman was the dominant type among them, but the general average in point of respectability was so high that it gave to the company rather the appearance of a gathering of thebourgeoisiethan of proletarians. Had the proportion between men and women been reversed, without change of average status, I might have been in a prayer-meeting. But the prayer-meeting in sustaining the resemblance would have been one of marked vitality.
Speeches were following one another in quick succession. Some were good and some were vapid; some were in broken English, and others were in English more than broken; but all were surcharged with the kind of earnestness which captivates attention. Irresistibly at times one was reminded of the propaganda of a new faith. Much was said the meaning of which I could not catch, but the spirit of it all was not far to seek. Here there was no cant; there was room for none. These men believed that they had hold of a truth which is regenerating society. In the face of a world deep-rooted in an individualistic organization of industry and of social order, they preached a gospel of collectivism, with unbounded belief in its ultimate triumph.
At times there was a malignant animus in what they said, when argument was enforced from sources of personal experience; for men would speak with the intensity of feeling of those who know what hunger is and what it is to hear their children cry for bread, while within their sight is the wasteful luxury of the rich. But a certain earnest moderateness of speech was far more common, and it sometimes revealed a breadth of view and an acquaintance with economics which to me were astonishing.
Yet, after all, it was the personal note that they touched most effectively in what they said. Strong, sturdy men, with every mark upon them of workmanlike efficiency, spoke feelingly of the relation, which they said, was growing up between what they called “the two great classes of society,” the employing and the employed. They declared the wage-earner essentially a “wage-slave” under present conditions, and they contrasted his lot unfavorably with that of an actual bondsman. The chattel-slave, they said, his master buys outright, and having made him thus a part of his invested capital, he shields him, out of a purely selfish motive, it is true, yet shields him, from bodily harm. But not the body of an industrial slave, merely his capacity for work, his employer buys, and he may drive him to the exhaustion of his last power of endurance, knowing perfectly well that, should he wreck him physically, the labor market would instantly supply a hundred men eager to take the vacant place on the same terms. And it is little relief to the feelings of the wage-slave, they added, to be assured that he is not sold, but is free to sell his labor in the open market, when he recalls the hard necessity that conditions that freedom. It was interesting to find them paraphrasing, as Old Pete had done in the logging camp, the dictum of Carlyle—
“Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine.”
Then, as an expression of the belief of the gathering, a member introduced a resolution which pronounced it to be a truth in the relation of the individual to society, that “in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a living, should refuse to work, and should steal,hewould be a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his personal liberty and be forced to work. But in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a chance to earn a living, should find no opportunity, and should, therefore, be forced to steal,societywould be the criminal, and ought to furnish the remedy.”
The resolution was passed unanimously and with much show of approval. But I was more interested in its introducer. He was a curious departure from the prevailing type; short and straight and slender, with a small, thin face whose skin was like old, exquisite, wrinkled parchment. His bright eyes, set close together, moved ceaselessly as though sensitive to a certain mental restlessness; a thin aquiline nose curved delicately in the nostrils above a gray mustache which half concealed a thin-lipped mouth of uncertain drawing. Over all was a really fine, dome-like brow, quite bald and polished, while from the sides and back of his head there grew a mass of iron-gray hair which fell curling to his shoulders. I shall take the liberty of calling him “the Poet.” There was a nervous grace in his movements, and a thorough self-possession in his manner, and a quality of cultivation and refinement in his voice and speech, which were clearly indicative of breeding and education and of native talent. Yet his position among the Socialists seemed not at all that of a distinctive leader; he was simply one of the company, on terms of perfect equality, and he addressed the others and was himself addressed with the fraternal “Comrade” in all the intimacy of primitive Christianity. It was with instant anticipation of the pleasure of it that I learned from the announcements that the Poet would read, in an early meeting, a paper on the burning question of the opening of the World’s Fair on Sundays.
A woman sat near the front. I had seen her in frequent whispered consultation with the chairman, whom I shall call “the Leader,” and with the Poet and the Peddler and other members who sat about her, and I judged that she was high in the councils of the Socialists, and I shall name her “the Citizeness.”
In the midst of the applause which marked the passage of the resolution, she was on her feet—a dark, portly woman of middle age, dressed very simply in black, bearing herself with an air of accustomedness which showed that she was by no means a novice on the floor, and speaking, when quiet was restored, with a directness and an unaffected ease which had in them no loss of femininity. But you had only to watch closely in order to see nature avenge herself in a certain self-assertation which the Citizeness felt forced at times to assume, for the sake of emphasis, and in a certain very feminine straining after the sarcastic.
A room full of people sitting in pews. One woman is walking back down the aisle.IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.
IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.
IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.
She held a newspaper in her hand, and from it, she said, she wished to read a fragment of a speech made by Mr. —— to a large gathering of his subordinates in the administration of a railway system of which he is the president.
It was a short paragraph, in the characteristic, oratorical English of that genial railway president when he becomes serious, and its purport was simply a charge to those who bear to workingmen the relation of authoritative direction to treat them with the utmost consideration. “These are anxious times,” he said, substantially, “and there are grave indications which go to show that workingmen are increasingly regarding themselves as a class apart and their interests as being antagonized by those of their employers. All employers and directors of labor in all personal contact with their men should, therefore, exercise the greatest care in their treatment of them, to the end that these men may not be made to feel unnecessarily what is distasteful to them in their condition of subordination.”
“That,” said the Citizeness, “is a significant sign of the times. I have rarely seen words which indicate more clearly the growing frame of mind of the capitalists. They are beginning to wake up to the fact of danger. Oh, yes, when it begins to be a question of self-preservation they show signs of some knowledge of the actual situation! But just see how foxy they are. Mr. —— does not tell his fellow-employers to treat their men well because they ought to, and he doesn’t talk any foolishness about the interests of labor and capital being identical. He knows better than that. He knows perfectly well that the men in the employ of his corporation are wage-slaves. He knows it a good deal better than most of the men themselves know it. And what he is telling his fellow-capitalists, who are beginning to feel alarm over the situation, is this, that in all their treatment of their men they must make a point of disguising from them their real condition of servitude. Keep them in servitude, of course, but by all possible means keep them in ignorance of it, for the greatest danger to the existing order of things lies in an awakening of workingmen, and already there are signs of such an awakening, and ‘the times’ are, therefore, ‘anxious.’”
Tumultuous applause followed this sally. It expressed the prevalent thought as no word of the afternoon had done. “Capital conspiring to maintain the existing bondage of labor—growing anxious at symptoms of dawning intelligence among its slaves, and disclosing, in a moment of unguarded anxiety, its real spirit through a feigned one!” “What clearer proof of the truth could be asked?” men seemed to say, as they looked eagerly into one another’s faces, and kept on applauding.
Before the noise subsided the Peddler again had gained the floor. He harked back to his original theme of “education,” and was showing its applicability to the situation from the new point of view.
“The greatest obstacle to Socialism,” he exclaimed, with some vehemence, “is the brute ignorance among ourselves, the working-classes. And the greatest bulwark of the cruel, crushing, competitive anarchy under which we suffer and die is this same ignorance of the workers. It is not organized capital that blocks the way of Socialism, for organized capital is unconsciously hastening the day when all capital will be organized under the common ownership of all the people. It is the dead weight of poor, blinded, befooled wage-slaves which hangs like an incubus about the neck of Socialism. It is through this that the truth must make its way, and will make its way, until workingmen at last awake to an acceptance of that which so long has been striving with them to get itself accepted.
“But alas! alas! how slow the process is! And through what density of ignorance and indifference and prejudice must the light shine!
“Sitting in the street-car beside me, as I rode down this afternoon, was a workingman whom I know well. I invited him to come to this meeting with me. I told him that we were going to talk about matters which concerned him deeply. And what did he say? Why, he laughed in my face, and said that he did not see much sense in talking about such things, and that he preferred putting in his Sunday afternoon at the ‘mat-in-ee,’ and having a good laugh. Poor, miserable wretch! working like a galley-slave through the week, and caring for nothing on his day of rest but an extra allowance of sleep, and then further forgetfulness of his daily lot in the crowds and the lights and the illusions and heart-breaking fun of the cheap theatres. All that remains for him then is to go home drunk, and get up the next morning to the twofold hell of his common life.”
It was growing dark within the hall, and the meeting was quietly adjourned until the next Sunday. But the members were slow in leaving. They formed into small groups, and went on discussing earnestly the topics of the afternoon, as they stood among the benches, or moved slowly toward the door.
The street-lights were burning with flickering, dancing effect through the falling snow, and under them great crowds of working-people came streaming through the wide-open doors of the theatres, swarming upon the pavements and in the street-cars, well-dressed, and quiet in the pre-occupation of pleasure-seekers homeward bound, and not a little impatient for early transportation.
I walked alone in the direction of the lodging-house. Deep is the spell of real conviction, and the thoughts of these working-people, all alive with belief, were passing warm and glowing through my mind. That there are multitudes of workers who are looking earnestly for a better social order, and who intelligently and firmly believe in its possibility, I had known, but never before had I felt the inspiration of actual contact with them.
And the fascination of their point of view! “A world full of want and misery and cruelty, by reason, most of all, of the wasteful war of competition between man and his brother man in the wilderness of anarchical production in which the people blindly wander; while over against them, awaiting their occupation, is a promised land of peace and plenty, where poverty and want, and their attendant miseries and tendencies to moral evil, will be unknown, if men can but be induced to cross the Jordan which separates lawless competition from intelligent and provident co-operation.”
How quick and sure is such an appeal to the human heart! It is the world-old charm, charming men anew. A royal road at last, a wide gate and a broad way leading unto life! The way of salvation made easy! It is the Patriarchs again trusting to their sacrifices; the old Jews to circumcision and the blood of Abraham; the spiritually blinded Christians to their outward symbols; and all of them deaf to that truest word of all philosophy, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
It is so easy to conceive of some change in outward conditions, some “remedy,” some “solution” for the ills from which we suffer, and which, having been accepted, would lift life to a plane of harmonious and frictionless movement, and set us free henceforth to follow our own wills and purposes and desires. And it is so supremely difficult to realize that the way of life lies not that way at all, not in the pursuit of happiness nor in the fulfilment of our own wills, but in realizing that the universe is governed by laws of right and justice and truth, and in bringing our wills into subjection to those laws and our actions into harmony with them.
One of these laws, I take it, is the law “the universal brotherhood of man.” And it is by the practical denial of this law in the dealing of men with their fellow-men that much of the world’s cruelest misery has been caused, and much of the seed of terrible retribution has been sown.
It was their firm belief in the truth of brotherhood which gave to the words of the Socialists their greatest strength and charm. It was plainly fundamental to all their views. Ignorance and prejudice and unphilosophical thinking warped their expressed ideas and made their speeches very human, but yet in them all was this saving hold on truth, a living belief in the solidarity of the human race and in the responsibilities which grow out of the bond of universal kinship.
At the corner near my lodging-house I stood still for a few moments watching the deft movements of two young children who were busy near the curb. The long, wide street lay a field of glistening diamonds where the blue-white electric light was reflected from the snow. A drunken man reeled past me, tracking the untrodden snow at the sides of the beaten path along the centre of the pavement. A dim alley at my right lost itself in almost impenetrable darkness, on the verge of which a small wooden house appeared tottering to ruin and as though the weight of the falling snow were hastening its end. From out the alley came the figures of three young women who were laughing gayly as they crossed the street in company and walked on toward the post-office. The street was very still and lonely for that quarter, and the two little girls worked diligently, talking to each other, but oblivious apparently to everything but their task. I drew nearer to see what they were doing. A street-light shone strong and clear above them, and they were in the path of a broad stream of yellow glare that poured from the windows of a cheap chop-house. They were at work about a barrel which stood on the curb. I could see that it was full of the refuse of the eating-house. Scraps of meat and half-eaten fragments of bread and of vegetables lay mixed with bones and egg-shells and vegetable skins in a pulpy ooze, rising to the barrel rim and overflowing upon the pavement and in the gutter. An old wicker basket, with paper covering its ragged holes, rested between the children, and into this they dropped selected morsels of food. The larger girl was tall enough to see over the top of the barrel, and so she worked there, and I saw her little hands dive into the soft, glutinous mass after new treasures. The smaller one could only crouch upon the pavement and gather thence and from the gutter what edible fragments she could find. I watched them closely. The older child was dressed in thin, ragged cotton, black with filth, and her matted, stringy hair fell from her uncovered head about a lean, peaked face that was as dirty almost as her dress. She wore both shoes and stockings, but the shoes were far too large for her, and through their gaping holes the cold and wet entered freely. Her sister was more interesting to me. She was a child of four or five. The snow was falling upon her bare brown curls and upon the soft white flesh of her neck, and over the damp, clinging, threadbare dress, through which I could trace the delicate outlines of an infant’s figure. Her warm breath passed hissing through chattering teeth in the intervals between outbursts of a deep, hoarse cough which shook her frame. Through the streaking dirt upon her hands appeared in childish movement the dimples above the knuckles, and the dainty fingers, red and cold and washed clean at their tips in the melting snow, had in them all the power and mystery of the waxen baby touch.
With the quick illusion of childhood they had turned their task into a game, and they would break into exclamations of delight as they held up to each other’s view some discovered morsel which the finder claimed to be the best.
“What are you going to do with these scraps?” I asked of the older child.
Her bloodless lips were trembling with the cold, and her small, dark eyes appeared among the shreds of tangled hair with an expression in them of a starved pariah whose cherished bone is threatened. She clasped the basket with both hands and half covered it with her little body.
“Don’t you touch it!” she said, fiercely, while her anxious eyes searched the street in hope of succor.
A street scene where it is raining. An adult man is looking down at two children with a basket.“DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.
“DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.
“DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.
It was easy to reassure her, and then she spoke freely.
“Ma sent us to get some grub for supper,” she explained. “Ma’s got three boarders, only two of ’em ain’t paid nothing for a month, and pa, he’s drunk. He ain’t got no job, but he went out to shovel snow to-day, and ma thought he’d bring her some money, but he came home drunk. She’s mindin’ the baby, and she sent us for grub. She’d lick us if we didn’t find none; but I guess she won’t lick us now, will she? That’s where we live,” and one little chapped finger pointed down the alley to the crumbling hovel in the dark.
The children were ready to go home, and I lifted the younger girl into my arms. Her sister walked beside us with the basket in her hand. The little one lay soft and warm against me. After the first moment of surprise, she had relaxed with the gentle yielding of a little child, and I could feel her nestle close to me with the trustful ease which thrills one’s inmost heart with feeling for which there are no words.
We opened the shanty door. It was difficult at first to make out the room’s interior. Dense banks of tobacco-smoke drifted lazily through foul air in the cheerful light of a small oil-lamp. Shreds of old wall-paper hung from dark, greasy plaster, which was crumbling from the walls and ceiling and which lay in accumulations of lime-dust upon a rotting wooden floor. A baby of pallid, putty flesh was crying fretfully in the arms of a haggard, slatternly woman of less than thirty years, who sat in a broken chair, rocking the baby in her arms beside a dirty wooden table, on which were strewn fragments of broken pottery and unwashed forks and spoons and knives. A rough workman, stripped to his shirt and trousers, sat smoking a clay pipe, his bare feet resting in the oven of a rusty cooking-stove in which a fire was smouldering. Upon a heap of rags in one corner lay a drunken man asleep.
“We’ve got some grub, ma!” cried the older child, in a tone of success, as she ran up to her mother with the basket. “Riley’s barrel was full to-night.”
Several poorly dressed people in a a room. One woman is nursing a child. One man is carrying a child in the doorway.“WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET. “RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT.”
“WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET. “RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT.”
“WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET. “RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT.”
In the continued search for work through the succeeding day it was natural to drift early into the employment bureaus. Clark and I made a careful round of these, he in search of employment at his trade and I of any job that offered. Here, too, however, we were but units in the great number of seekers. Some of the agencies offered for a small fee and a nominal price of transportation to ship us to the farther West or to the Northwest and insure us employment with gangs of day-laborers, but of work in Chicago they could promise none.
In the course of a day last week, as I was going about alone, I was attracted by the prominent sign of an employment bureau, on the West Side, which we had not visited so far. It was the conventional bureau, much like the office of a steamship company. It occupied the floor above the basement, reached by a flight of steps from the pavement; a row of wooden chairs stood along the outer wall; a wooden partition extended down the centre of the room, with a door and two windows in it. The hour was noon and the office was deserted but for a comparatively young man of florid face and close-set, light-brown eyes, thin hair, and a bristling mustache clipped close above his mouth. He was at work upon his books behind one of the windows. With a direct, matter-of-fact glance he looked me over, and then his eye sought the place on the open page held by his finger.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I am looking for work,” I said. “Have you any employment to offer?”
“What kind of work?”
“I am a day-laborer,” I replied.
“Nothing,” he said, laconically, and his eye followed the finger as it moved across the open page.
I waited for a moment, thinking that he might say more, but he remained silent at his work.
“If not in Chicago, perhaps you can put me in the way of work near here,” I ventured.
“Young man,” he said, and his clear, cold eyes were looking straight into mine, “Young man, we can’t get enough of you fellows in the spring and summer time; we have to go to you and beg you to go to work. You’re mighty independent then, and you don’t give a damn for us. But it’s our turn now. You can do some begging now and see how you like it. It’s good enough for you. No, there ain’t a job that I know of in Chicago that you can get, unless it is in the sewers, and you ain’t fit for that.”
“But give me a chance at it,” I urged.
“I wouldn’t take the responsibility,” he answered. “It would kill a man of your build in a week, and you couldn’t pass the first inspection, anyway.” And so ended my efforts through the employment agencies.
The newspapers are always an unfailing resort, as a hopeful source of information of any demand for labor. A newspaper in the very early morning, before the city is astir, is a treasure, for any clew to work can then be promptly followed up with some chance of one’s being the first to apply. Papers are to be had in abundance later in the day in public reading-rooms and about railway stations and hotel-corridors. It is, however, the newspaper damp from press that is most valuable to us, and between us and its possession is often the insuperable barrier of its price. The journals which early post their issues upon bulletin-boards are public benefactors, and about these boards in the early dawn often there are groups of men who study closely the “want columns.”
A very little experience was enough to disclose the fact that there is a wide difference in the character of these notices in different newspapers. In some issues the want-column is very short, but the statements bear every mark of genuineness; in others it is promisingly long, but, when carefully analyzed, it proves to be chiefly a collection of decoys for the unwary. The city seems to be full of men and women seeking employment. Not only are there the penniless common workmen of my class, whose number must be reckoned in many thousands, and among whom the professionally idle form, of course, a large percentage, but there are multitudes of mechanics and skilled workers, of whom Clark is a type. And beyond these is an army of seekers after salaried posts like those of clerks and bookkeepers and the various subordinate positions of business and professional life. Not all were penniless when they began their search for work there. Hundreds of them had a little store of money when their last employment gave out, or they brought with them when they came their savings, which they hopefully counted upon to last until a new place had been found.
How large a body of sharpers live by preying upon the credulity of these classes it would be difficult to discover, as it also would be difficult to discover all the tricks of their trade. The craft of the bunco-steerers is certainly well known, and yet it perennially finds its victims, and largely, no doubt, among the classes of whom I am speaking. But there are other snares, less sudden but quite as disastrous as those of the bunco-steerers, and far more insidious, since they have about them the apparent sanction of legitimate business. It is these that make most open use of the want-columns of certain of the newspapers. Agencies are advertised, and in them, after the payment of a small fee and the purchase of the needed outfit, large earnings are guaranteed as the result of putting some product upon the market. Opportunities are offered for the investment of a little capital—sums as low as five and ten dollars are solicited—and immense returns are promised. Requests for men are made in urgent terms: “Wanted—three—five—seven men at once. Steady employment guaranteed; good pay. No previous experience necessary. Apply at No. — —— Street, second floor front.”
One morning I marked a dozen or more of these notices in one newspaper, and carefully made the rounds of the addresses given. In every case I found an establishment which purported to do business at coloring photographs. I was offered employment in each instance. The conditions were as uniform as those governing a regular market. Two dollars was the invariable fee for being taught the secret of the process. One dollar would purchase the needed materials.
There was always a strong demand, enough to insure abundant work until spring. “Our agents are sending in large orders all the time,” was the conventional explanation. “You can soon learn to color ten or twelve photographs in a day, and we will pay you at the rate of three dollars a dozen for them.” The discovery that I had no money invariably brought the interview abruptly to an end in an atmosphere which cooled suddenly. I met many actual victims of these devices; one will serve as a type.
We both had been sitting for some time on a crowded bench in the lobby of a lodging-house. Each was absorbed in his own “bitterness,” and oblivious to the presence of other men and to the tumult of the room. My companion was cheerfully responsive when I spoke to him, and we both accepted gladly the relief of an interchange of confidence. He was three days beyond the end of his resources. So far he had been fortunate in securing the cost of food and the price of a ten-cent lodging, and had not yet been forced to the station-house. But on that evening, for the first time, he had learned of the station lodging. It loomed for him as the logic of events, and he dreaded it. It was of this that he was thinking gloomily when I spoke to him.
Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world. He had lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless. Then he worked for other farmers for two years, and studied as best he could. Finally he secured a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the summers.
His coming to Chicago was a stroke of ambition. A post as a salesman or a bookkeeper could be got, he had felt sure, if he was persistent enough in his search, and this, he thought, would serve him as a starting-point to a business career. He had counted upon a long, hard search for place, and so he had come forearmed with his savings, which, when he reached Chicago, more than two months before this evening, amounted to a little over fifty dollars when he found himself in lodgings in a decent flat on Division Street.
He paid at first two dollars a week for a room which contained a bed and bureau and a wash-stand, and which was warmed by a small oil-stove. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, and a shade at the window which looked out upon an alley and the blank brick wall of a house opposite. The bed-linen was changed once in two weeks. In addition to that outlay he was spending, on an average, fifty cents a day for food and an occasional dime in car-fare. All this was luxury. His last lodging, before he was forced upon the street, was a seventy-five-cent closet in a house on Meridian Street, on the West Side. The room contained a cot with an old mattress and some blankets, and there was a soap-box on end which would hold a lamp. He was obliged to wash himself at the sink in the public passage.
There had been an analogous change in the range of employment sought. All idea of a mercantile post had been at last abandoned, and he was in for any honest living to which his hands could help him.
It was when he had broken his last five-dollar note that he made once more the rounds of the doubtful offices which offer work. A photograph-coloring establishment was his final choice. He paid the fee of two dollars, received the instructions, which were very simple, purchased for a dollar a box of materials, accepted half a dozen photographs to begin upon, and then went to his room with his mind made up to succeed at the work if there was any success in it.
With utmost patience and care he practised upon the pictures. Difficulties in the process arose against which he had not been warned. He went for further instructions and was given them willingly. After nearly three days of almost constant industry he finished the six photographs. These were to yield him a dollar and a half, and he took them with a sense of achievement to the office. His employer examined them and good-naturedly pointed out certain defects which he was asked to remedy. The remedy seemed simple, but he saw at a glance that, in reality, it would require his undoing practically all his work and performing it over again, at a great risk of ruining the photographs in the attempt.
He thought that he saw an escape from that, so he proposed to his employer that the alterations should be made at the establishment; that he himself should be paid nothing for the first work, but that he should be given a second lot of pictures to color. The man agreed instantly, and handed to him a fresh package containing half a dozen photographs. These he carried back to his room. When he undid the wrapper he found that he had been given a job which would require at least a week to finish. Each photograph was unlike the others. Besides one or two more or less difficult human figures in each, there were elaborate backgrounds of draperies and rustic benches and potted plants. He took the package back and asked for something simpler—more within his power as a beginner. His employer explained to him cheerfully that he had nothing else just then, but that he was sure of easier work for him by the time that he had finished this.
The poor fellow walked out into the street knowing that he had been swindled out of three dollars and three days’ hard work, and that penniless now, he must take up the search again, and that there was no redress for him.
Several times after this I saw him and I pressed upon him each time the plan of returning to his former home in northern Indiana, or striking out anywhere into the open country, where his intelligence and his former experience would stand him in good stead, and where he would probably not have to look long for a job. This was keenly distasteful to him, for it would be a tacit acknowledgment of defeat, and the man was not without courage and pluck. I met him last one early morning after his first night as a lodger in a station-house. His eyes were starting from his head, and he wore the wild, hunted look which I had watched with alarm in Clark. He would scarcely stop to talk. He was off for the open country and his former home.
Before many days had passed Clark and I began to lose the sense of being recruits in the army of the unemployed. We soon acquired the feeling of veterans, and with it a certain naturalness as of long habit. It is not a little strange how swift this adjustment is. We fell into some of the ways of the other men with an ease which seemed to imply a long antecedent wont. This was after Clark had despaired of work in a foundry, and had reached the level of willingness to sweep a crossing for a living, if only he could get the job.
One of the habits which came most readily to us was to join the crowds which stand in the early morning about the gates of large productive institutions. Sometimes a superintendent finds himself short-handed of common labor in a permanent department of the work or for an emergency, and he sends a foreman out to the gates to secure the needed men. This happens very rarely, if I may judge from our experience; and yet, upon so slender a chance as this, hundreds of men stand each day in the market-places for labor, waiting hopefully for some husbandman in want of workers.
Clark and I soon made a considerable round. One morning we were at the gates of the Exposition grounds, another at the Stock-yards, and then at various factory gates on the West Side.
We were up at five one clear, cold morning near the middle of December, in order to try our luck at the gates of a factory which lies four miles or more from the heart of the city. It was no great hardship to set off without a breakfast, for we had supped heartily on the night before, and had gladly spent our remaining cash for beds in preference to sleeping in the station-house.
Out of a cloudless sky blew a strong, dry, northwest wind across the snowless prairies, and it cut sharply, at right angles, through the long diagonal street which we followed to the far southwest. We did not loiter, for it took our fastest gait to keep us warm. The buildings shielded us in part, but around the corners the wind caught us with its unchecked force, and enveloped us often in clouds of driven dust which rose from the surface of the frozen streets. There was exhilaration in the walk; when we reached the centre of the viaduct which carries Blue Island Avenue across the various lines of railway which enter the city between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, we were in the full, unimpeded gale, and looking back we could see across the dark city the first slender shafts of light dimming the eastern stars.
It was still dark when we reached the factory gates, for the better part of an hour remained before the sun would be well up, and it was almost half an hour before the beginning of the day’s work. We were not the first to be on hand. Already there were groups of men who stood before the fast-closed gate, or stamped slowly up and down on the sleepers of the railway which enters the factory yard, or gathered for shelter behind the walls of neighboring buildings. The number of these men was growing fast. I thought at first that many of them were employees waiting for the morning opening of the factory. But when the heavy gate moved down its groove in answer to the keeper’s push, disclosing the open area of the factory yard and the long platforms flanking the warehouses, this company of waiting men, grown now to eighty or a hundred strong, stood against the high board fence and along the edges of a great stream of workingmen, which began to pour with increasing volume through the narrow way. A bell sounded from the factory tower, and you could hear the first slow movements of the piston-rods, and the answering stir among the fly-wheels as they warmed to swifter motion, and the straps and pulleys tuning up to the canticle of the working-day.