White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor by Banks, Louis Albert

Down-stairs, we look in on a mother and two grown daughters who are finishing pants for another fashionable firm, one which does a large business with clergymen. They are paid thirteen cents a pair, ordinarily, and for the very finest custom-made pants they receive as high as twenty cents, but complain, as it takes so much longer with the fine pants, that from two to three pairs is as much as one woman can complete in a day. There is a helpless air about this mother and her daughters that is very depressing.

[Illustration: POSTAL UNIFORMS.]

There has been quite a controversy recently as to where the new United States postal uniforms for the Boston carriers were made. I settled this question to my own satisfaction during the past week, when, in company with Dr. Luther T. Townsend, of Boston University, and two other gentlemen, one of them being an Italian interpreter, I climbed the rickety stairs of an old North End tenement house, and found the pants for these same uniforms being made by Italian women at _nine and a half cents a pair_! They received them from a Jewish sweater. One of these women says that, by beginning at four o'clock in the morning and frequently working until twelve o'clock at night, she can make six pairs of these pants in a day. She has five children; the rent is two dollars per week. The husband has been out of work for eight months; the only one of the children who is able to earn anything is a boy who is a bootblack, and can earn, in fine weather, three dollars a week. Another woman at work on these postal uniforms, who was not able to labor quite such long hours, could only make four pairs a day. She also had five children, the only one able to earn anything being a daughter, fourteen years of age, who works in a sweater's shop for two dollars a week.

On the walls of the rooms in this building where the postal uniforms were being made, the cockroaches were crawling, and in some places were swarming as thick as ants about an anthill.