uncertainties attending the wholesale manufacturer, and as the work is given to them at prices at or even below the “life limit,” it is not surprising that those to whom they in turn pass it on find their percentage to mean something much nearer death than life.
“Only blind eyes could have failed to see all this before,” some reader is certain to say. “How is it possible that any one dealing directly with the question could doubt for a moment the existence of this and a thousand-fold worse fraud?”
Only possible from the same fact that makes these papers a necessity. They hold only new phases of the old story. The grain has had not one threshing alone, but many, and yet for the most patient and persistent of searchers after truth is ever fresh surprise at its nature and extent. Given one or a dozen exposures of a fraud, and we settle instinctively into the conviction that its power has ended. It is barely conceivable to the honest mind that cheating has wonderful staying power, and that not one nor a thousand exposures will turn into straight paths feet used to crooked ones. And when a business man, born to all good things and owning a name known as the synonyme of the best the Republic offers to-day, states calmly, “There is no such thing as business without lying,” what room remains for honor or justice or humanity among men whose theory is the same, and who can gild it with no advantage of birth or training? It is a wonderful century, and we are civilizing with a speed that takes away the breath and dims the vision, but there are dark corners still, and in the shadow Greed and Corruption and Shame hold high carnival, with nameless shapes, before which even civilization cowers. Their trace is found at every turn, but we deal with only one to-day, helpless, even when face to face, to say what method will most surely mean destruction.
We settle so easily into the certainty that nothing can be as bad as it seems, that moments of despair come to all who would rouse men to action. Not one generation nor many can answer the call sounding forever in the ears of every son of man; but he who has heeded has at least made heeding more possible for those that follow; and the time comes at last when the way must be plain for all. To make it plainer many a popular conviction must be laid aside, and among them the one that follows.
It is a deeply rooted belief that the poor understand and feel for the poor beyond any possibility in those who have never known cold and hunger and rags save as uncomfortable terms used too freely by injudicious agitators. Like many another popular belief the groundwork is in the believer’s own mind, and has its most tangible existence in story-books. There are isolated cases always of self-sacrifice and compassion and all gentle virtues, but long experience goes to show that if too great comfort is deadening, too little is brutalizing, and that pity dies in the soul of man or woman to whom no pity has been shown. It is easy to see, then, how the woman who has found injustice and oppression the law of life, deals in the same fashion when her own time comes, and tyrannizes with the comfortable conviction that she is by this means getting even with the world. She knows every sore spot, and how best to make the galled jade wince, and lightens her own task by the methods practised in the past upon herself. This is one species to be dealt with, and a far less dangerous one than the craftier and less outspokenly brutal order, just above her in grade. It is by these last that some of the chief frauds on women are perpetrated, and here we find one source of the supplies that furnish the bargain counters.
We read periodically of firms detected in imposing upon women, and are likely to feel that such exposure has ended their career as firms once for all. In every trade will be found one or more of these, whose methods of obtaining hands are fraudulent, and who advertise for “girls to learn the trade,” with no intention of retaining them beyond the time in which they remain content to work without pay. There are a thousand methods of evasion, even when the law faces them and the victim has made formal complaint. As a rule she is too ignorant and too timid for complaint or anything but abject submission, and this fact is relied upon as certain foundation for success. But, if determined enough, the woman has some redress in her power. Within a few years, after long and often defeated attempts, the Woman’s Protective Union has brought about legislation against such fraud, and any employer deliberately withholding wages is liable to fifteen days’ imprisonment and the costs of the suit brought against him, a fact of which most of them seem to be still quite unaware. This law, so far as imprisonment is concerned, has no application to women, and they have learned how to evade the points which might be made to bear upon them, by hiring rooms, machines, etc., and swearing that they have no personal property that can be levied upon. Or, if they have any, they transfer it to some friend or relative, as in the case of Madame M – , a fashionable dressmaker notorious for escaping from payment seven times out of ten. She has accumulated money enough to become the owner of a large farm on Long Island, but so ingeniously have all her arrangements been made that it is impossible to make her responsible, and her case is used at the Union as a standing illustration of the difficulty of circumventing a woman bent upon cheating.
A firm, a large proportion of whose goods are manufactured in this manner, can well afford to stock the bargain counters of popular stores. They can afford also to lose slightly by work imperfectly done, though, even with learners, this is in smaller proportion than might be supposed. The girl who comes in answer to their advertisement is anxious to learn the trade at once, and gives her best intelligence to mastering every detail. Her first week is likely to hold an energy of effort that could hardly last, and she can often be beguiled by small payments and large promises to continue weeks and even months, always expecting the always delayed payment. Firms dealing in such fashion change their quarters often, unless in league with police captains who have been given sufficient reasons for obliviousness of their methods, and who have also been known to silence timid complaints with the threat of a charge of theft. But there is always a multitude ready to be duped, and no exposure seems sufficient to prevent this, and women who have once established a business on this system seem absolutely reckless as to any possible consequences.
There is at present on Third Avenue a Mrs. F – , who for eleven years has conducted a successful business built upon continuous fraud. She is a manufacturer of underwear, and the singular fact is that she has certain regular employees who have been with her from the beginning, and who, while apparently unconscious of her methods, are practically partners in the fraud. She is a woman of good presence and address, and one to whom girls submit unquestioningly, contending, even in court, that she never meant to cheat them; and it is still an open question with those who know her best how far she herself recognizes the fraud in her system. The old hands deny that it is her custom to cheat, and though innumerable complaints stand against her, she has usually paid on compulsion, and insisted that she always meant to. Her machines never lack operators, and the grade of work turned out is of the best quality. Her advertisement appears at irregular intervals, is answered by swarms of applicants, and there are always numbers waiting their turn. On a side street a few blocks distant is a deep basement, crowded with machines and presided over by a woman with many of her personal characteristics. It is the lowest order of slop work that is done here, but it helps to fill the bargain counters of the poorer stores, and the workers are an always shifting quantity. It is certain that both places are practically the property of Mrs. F – , but no man has yet been cunning enough to determine once for all her responsibility, and no law yet framed covers any ground that she has chosen as her own. Her prototypes are to be found in every trade open to women, and their numbers grow with the growth of the great city and strengthen in like proportion. The story of one is practically the story of all. Popularly supposed to be a method of trickery confined chiefly to Jews, investigation shows that Americans must share the odium in almost as great degree, and that the long list includes every nationality known to trade.
We have dealt thus far with fraud as the first and chief procurer for bargain counters. Another method results from a fact that thus far must sum up as mainly Jewish. Till within very little more than a year, a large dry-goods firm on the west side employed many women in its underwear department. The work was piece-work, and done by the class of women who own their own machines and work at home. Prices were never high, but the work was steady and the pay prompt. The firm for a time made a specialty of “Mother Hubbard” night-gowns, for which they paid one dollar a dozen for “making,” this word covering the making and putting in of yoke and sleeves, the “seamer” having in
