pitiful in the extreme.
Even in a small town where rent is not so high, these paltry wages would
have been insufficient for an existence of partial decency. But in
Chicago, with its forbidding rents, the increasing cost of all
necessaries, and all of the other expenses incident to life in a large
city, their wages were notoriously scanty.

Large numbers of them were driven to herding in foul tenements or evil
dwellings, the inducements of which was the rent, a little lighter than
could be had elsewhere. Every cent economized meant much. If an
investigator (as often happened) had observed them, and had followed
them to their wretched homes after their day's work, he would have
noted, or learned of, these conditions: Their food was circumscribed and
coarse--the very cheapest forms of meat, and usually stale bread. Butter
was a superfluous luxury. The morning meal was made up of a chunk of
bread washed down with "coffee"--adulterated stuff with just a faint
odor of real coffee. At noon, bread and an onion, or a bit of herring,
or a slice of cheap cheese composed their dinner, with perhaps a dash of
dessert in the shape of sweetened substance, artificially colored, sold
as "cake." For supper, cheap pork, or a soup bone, garnished
occasionally in the season by stale vegetables, and accompanied by a
concoction resembling tea. Few of these workers ever had more than one
suit of clothes, or more than one dress. They could not afford
amusements, and were too fatigued to read or converse. At night bunches
of them bunked together--sometimes eight or ten in a single room; by
this arrangement the rent of each was proportionately reduced.

It is now we come to a sinister result of these methods of exploiting
the wage-working girls and women. The subject is one that cannot be
approached with other than considerable hesitancy, not because the facts
are untrue, but because its statistical nature has not been officially
investigated. Nevertheless, the facts are known; stern, inflexible
facts. For true historical accuracy, as well as for purposes of
humanity, they must be given; that delicacy would be false, misleading
and palliative which would refrain from tearing away the veil and from
exposing the putridity beneath.

Field was repeatedly charged with employing his workers at such
desperately low wages as to drive large numbers of girls and women, by
the terrifying force of poverty, into the alternative of prostitution.
How large th