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Most of the young English girls whom we can see in the Strand and Oxford Street are, or have been, tailoresses, and the conditions conduce to that effect." So great and wide-spread is this question of the increase of immorality in England, under the reign of the sweat-shop, that a barrister-at-law, Mr. Wm.
As soon as the hot, searching sunlight finds them, they will wriggle and squirm in agony until they can crawl under cover again. So I do not wonder that, when the hideous cruelty of the tenement-house sweat-shop is brought to light, the sweater and all his friends wriggle and squirm in an agony of fright and shame.
If this system is allowed to go on, there are people living in luxury, who are indifferently pooh-poohing this whole question, whose grandchildren will be starved to death in a sweat-shop. No investment exacts such cruel usury as indifference to injustice. A wrong, uncared for in a North End tenement house will avenge itself, sooner or later, on Beacon Hill or Commonwealth Avenue.
We shudder in our armchairs at the thought of "cannon food," but why not shudder equally at the words "factory food," "mine food," and "sweat-shop food"? We are inclined to sentimentalize over those brave lives that have been spent by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of France and Poland, but for the most part we live placidly unconscious of the lives ground out in industrial competition all about us.
It may be that a minimum wage, safety devices, laws wiping out sweat-shop methods, will reduce the number of handicapped girls.
If there be anything in Boston that can rival the cruelty of the tenement-house sweat-shop, you will find it in the dens of some chattel-mortgage sharks, whose business methods I have investigated. Here is a woman who made her living by making overalls at five cents a pair. Times, of course, were always hard with her. Her husband was out of work a good part of the time.
It is a device of American invention and was first used by the cigar makers in 1874. In 1880 their national body adopted the now familiar blue label and, with great skill and perseverance and at a considerable outlay of money, has pushed its union-made ware, in the face of sweat-shop competition, of the introduction of cigar making machinery, and of fraudulent imitation.
The clanging of cars and the rumbling of trucks mingled with the nearer sounds of whirring sewing machines in Lavinski's sweat-shop on the floor below. From somewhere around the corner came, at intervals, the sharp cry of a woman in agony. With that last sound Nance was all too familiar. The coming and going of a human life were no mystery to her.
But the children of the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the canning-factory are raised in a city slum, and never know what it is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or rest We are weary in our cradles From our mother's toil untold; We are born to hoarded weariness As some to hoarded gold.
Then the boys returned with the sorry gleanings of the base camp, and the business of making two tents from the soiled and torn sled-covers and darning worn-out socks and mittens, was put in hand. Our camp looked like a sweat-shop those days, with its cross-legged tailormen and its litter of snippets.
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