"Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor.
Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity.One instance of this I shall not soon forget.It was when I overheard, early one morning at a factory gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss.I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew, who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support.He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den, {5} barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.
"The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm.Up went the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones.Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm.But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh; and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no mortal tongue can speak."Concerning habitat, Mr.Jacob Riis has stated that in New York City, in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets, the size of which is 200 by 300, there is a warren of 2244human beings.
In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, and Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand human creatures,--quite a comfortable New England village to crowd into one city block.
The Rev.Dr.Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Canal, Hester, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets, says: "In a room 12 by 8 and 5.5 feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared their food....In another room, located in a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women and four boys,--nine, ten, eleven, and fifteen years old,--fourteen persons in all."Here humanity rots.Its victims, with grim humor, call it "tenant-house rot." Or, as a legislative report puts it: "Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary.
Here youth is ugly with loathsome disease, and the deformities which follow physical degeneration."These are the men and women who are what they are because they were not better born, or because they happened to be unluckily born in time and space.Gauged by the needs of the system, they are weak and worthless.The hospital and the pauper's grave await them, and they offer no encouragement to the mediocre worker who has failed higher up in the industrial structure.Such a worker, conscious that he has failed, conscious from the hard fact that he cannot obtain work in the higher employments, finds several courses open to him.He may come down and be a beast in the social pit, for instance; but if he be of a certain caliber, the effect of the social pit will be to discourage him from work.In his blood a rebellion will quicken, and he will elect to become either a felon or a tramp.
