gement in foul air, vile food, and dank dens. They
are there because they are so made that they are not fit to be higher up;
but filth and obscenity do not strengthen the neck, nor does chronic
emptiness of belly stiffen the back.

For the mediocre there is no hope. Mediocrity is a sin. Poverty is the
penalty of failure,--poverty, from whose loins spring the criminal and
the tramp, both failures, both discouraged workers. Poverty is the
inferno where ignorance festers and vice corrodes, and where the
physical, mental, and moral parts of nature are aborted and denied.

That the charge of rashness in splashing the picture be not incurred, let
the following authoritative evidence be considered: first, the work and
wages of mediocrity and inefficiency, and, second, the habitat:

The New York Sun of February 28, 1901, describes the opening of a factory
in New York City by the American Tobacco Company. Cheroots were to be
made in this factory in competition with other factories which refused to
be absorbed by the trust. The trust advertised for girls. The crowd of
men and boys who wanted work was so great in front of the building that
the police were forced with their clubs to clear them away. The wage
paid the girls was $2.50 per week, sixty cents of which went for car
fare. {4}

Miss Nellie Mason Auten, a graduate student of the department of
sociology at the University of Chicago, recently made a thorough
investigation of the garment trades of Chicago. Her figures were
published in the American Journal of Sociology, and commented upon by the
Literary Digest. She found women working ten hours a day, six days a
week, for forty cents per week (a rate of two-thirds of a cent an hour).
Many women earned less than a dollar a week, and none of them worked
every week. The following table will best summarize Miss Auten's
investigations among a portion of the garment-workers:

INDUSTRY AVERAGE AVERAGE NUMBER AVERAGE YEARLY
INDIVIDUAL OF WEEKS EARNINGS
WEEKLY WAGES EMPLOYED
Dressmakers $.90 42. $37.00
Pants-Finishers 1.31 27.58 42.41
Housewives and 1.58 30.21 47.49
Pants-Finishers
Seamstresses 2.03 32.78 64.10
Pants-makers 2.13 30.77 75.61
Miscellaneous 2.77 29.