of
drinking water, position of water-closets, length of time allowed for
lunch, length of working day, etc. Here the quality of the work was
lower, material, thread, and sewing being all of an order to be expected
from the price of the completed garment, ranging from forty to sixty
cents. The wages, however, did not fall so far below the average as
might be expected, the operator earning from five to eight dollars a
week during the busy season. But the greater number of manufacturers on
both east and west sides of the city turn over the work to middle-men,
or send it to the country, many factories being run in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, where rents are merely nominal. This proved to be the case
with several firms whose names represent a large business, but who find
less trouble and more profit in the contract system.

Still another method has gone far toward reducing the rates of payment
to the city worker, and this is the giving out the work in packages to
the wives and daughters of farmers in the outlying country. These women,
having homes, and thus no rent or general expenses to meet, take the
work at rates which for the city operators mean simply starvation, and
thus prices are kept down, and one more stumbling-block put in the way
of the unprotected worker. Careful examination of this phase shows that
the applicants, many of whom give assumed names, work simply for the
sake of pin-money, which is expended in dress. Now and then it is a case
of want, and often that of a woman who, failing to make her husband see
that she has any right to an actual cash share in what the work of her
own hands has helped to earn, turns to this as the only method of
securing some slight personal income. But for the most part, it is only
for pin-money; and no argument could convince these earners that their
work is in any degree illegitimate or fraught with saddest consequences
to those who, because of it, receive just so much the less. Nor would it
be possible to bring such argument to bear. To earn seems the
inalienable right of any who are willing to work, and the result of
methods will never be questioned by employer or employed, unless they
are forced to it by more powerful considerations than any at present
brought forward.

I have chosen to give these details minutely because they are,
practically, the summing up, not only for shirt-making, but for every
trade which can be said to come under the head of clothing, whether for