And presently a notice of general reduction to thirty-five cents a dozen was posted.There had been a union; it had won a strike two years before--and then had been broken up by shrewd employing of detectives who had got themselves elected officers.With the union out of the way, there was no check upon the bosses in their natural and lawful effort to get that profit which is the most high god of our civilization.A few of the youngest and most spirited girls--those from families containing several workers--indignantly quit.A few others murmured, but stayed on.The mass dumbly accepted the extra twist in the screw of the mighty press that was slowly squeezing them to death.Neither to them nor to Susan herself did it happen to occur that she was the cause of the general increase of hardship and misery.However, to have blamed her would have been as foolish and as unjust as to blame any other individual.The system ordained it all.Oppression and oppressed were both equally its helpless instruments.No wonder all the vast beneficent discoveries of science that ought to have made the whole human race healthy, long-lived and prosperous, are barely able to save the race from swift decay and destruction under the ravages of this modern system of labor worse than slavery--for under slavery the slave, being property whose loss could not be made good without expense, was protected in life and in health.
Susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning power.She had been deceived by her swiftness in the first days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her down.Her first week's earnings were only four dollars and thirty cents.This in her freshness, and in the busiest season when wages were at the highest point.
In the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little dingier--lived a man.Like herself he had no trade--that is, none protected by a powerful union and by the still more powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism.He was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most resourceful of men.He was insurance agent, toilet soap agent, piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of music on commission.He worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day.He made nominally about twelve to fifteen a week.
Actually--because of the poverty of his customers and his too sympathetic nature he made five to six a week--the most any working person could hope for unless in one of the few favored trades.Barely enough to keep body and soul together.And why should capital that needs so much for fine houses and wines and servants and automobiles and culture and charity and the other luxuries--why should capital pay more when so many were competing for the privilege of being allowed to work?
She gave up her room at Mrs.Tucker's--after she had spent several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking about the miseries of the fast women of the only class she could hope to enter."A woman," she decided, "can't even earn a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the right sort of a start.`To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' Gideon was my chance and I threw it away."Still, she did not regret.Of all the horrors the most repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who could take it away at his whim.
She disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls.
She believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls with more false pride, with more awe of snobbish conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug morality.She felt that she could bear with almost any annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see it and the nose smell it.But she found all the homes full, with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the working girls said, with professional objects of charity.Thus she had no opportunity to judge for herself whether there was any truth in the prejudice of the girls against these few and feeble attempts to mitigate the miseries of a vast and ever vaster multitude of girls.Adding together all the accommodations offered by all the homes of every description, there was a total that might possibly have provided for the homeless girls of a dozen factories or sweatshops--and the number of homeless girls was more than a quarter of a million, was increasing at the rate of more than a hundred a day.
Charity is so trifling a force that it can, and should be, disregarded.It serves no _good_ useful service.It enables comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor bring upon themselves.It obscures the truth that modern civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution.The reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish to be disturbed--and that we dearly love the tickling sensation in our vanity of generosity.
Susan was compelled to the common lot--the lot that will be the common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves.