In one of the better class of tenement-houses a woman, a polisher in a jewelry manufactory, said the other day:--
"I'm willing to work hard, I don't care how hard; but it's awful to me to see my little boy and the way he goes on. He's a cash-boy at D----'s, and they don't pay by the week, they pay by checks, so every cash-boy is on the keen jump after a call. They're so worried and anxious and afraid they won't get enough; and Johnny cries and says, 'O mamma, I do try, but there's one boy that always gets ahead of me.' I think it's an awful system, even if it does make them smart."
An awful system, yet in its ranks march more and more thousands every year. It would seem as if every force in modern civilization bent toward this one end of money-getting, and the child of days and the old man of years alike shared the passion and ran the same mad race. It is the passion itself that has outgrown all bounds and that faces us to-day,--the modern Medusa on which he who looks has no more heart of flesh and blood but forever heart of stone, insensible to any sorrow, unmoved by any cry of child or woman. It is with this shape that the battle must be, and no man has yet told us its issue. Nay, save here and there one, who counts that battle is needed, or sees the shadow of the terror walking not only in darkness but before all men's eyes, who is there that has not chosen blindness and will not hear the voice that pleads: "Let my people go free"?
"I used to think there were steady trades; but somehow now everything gets mixed, and you can't tell what's steady and what isn't."
"The Lord only knows! I've studied over it till I'm dazed, and sometimes I've wondered if my mind was weakening."
The speaker, a middle-aged Scotchwoman, whose tongue still held a little of the burr that thirty years of American life had not been able to extract, put her hand to her head as if the fault must concentrate there.
"If it was my trade alone," she said, "I might think I was to blame for not learning new ways, but it's the same in all. Now, take mattress-making. I learned that because I could help my father best that way. He was an upholsterer in Aberdeen, and came over to better himself, and he did if he hadn't signed notes for a friend and ruined himself. He upholstered in the big families for thirty years, and everybody knew his little place on Hudson Street. People then bought furniture to last, and had it covered with the best of stuff, and so with curtains and hangings. Damask was damask, I can tell you, and velvet lambrequins meant money. No cotton-back stuff. They got shaken and brushed and done up from moths. People had some respect for good material. Nobody respects anything now. I saw a rich woman the other day let her boy six years old empty a box of candy on a pale-blue satin couch, and then sit down on it and rub his shoes up and down on the edge. I say that when there's no respect left for anything it's no wonder decent work comes to an end. I make a mattress and there isn't an inch of it that isn't sewed to last and that isn't an honest piece of work, but you can go into any house-furnishing department and buy one that looks just as well for a third less money. Everything's so cheap that people don't care whether anything lasts or not, and so there's no decent work done; and people pretend to have learned trades when really they just botch things together. I just go round in houses and make over,--places that I've had for years; and I've been forewoman in a big factory, but somehow a factory mattress never seems to me as springy and good as the old kind. Upholsterers make pretty good wages, but it can't be called steady any more, though it used to be. I've thought many a time of going into business for myself, but competition's awful, and I'm afraid to try. I won't cheat, and there's no getting ahead unless you do."