ners were paid the most meager
wages, and were compelled to return those wages to the coal companies
and bear an incubus of debt besides, by being forced to buy all of their
goods and merchandise at company stores at extortionate rates. But where
the coal companies did the thing boldly and crudely, the Pullman Company
surrounded the exploitation with deceptive embellishments.

The mechanism, although indirect, was simple. While, for instance, the
cost of gas to the Pullman Company was only thirty-three cents a
thousand feet, every worker living in the town of Pullman had to pay at
the rate of $2.25 a thousand feet. If he desired to retain his job he
could not avoid payment; the company owned the exclusive supply of gas
and was the exclusive landlord. The company had him in a clamp from
which he could not well escape. The workers were housed in ugly little
pens, called cottages, built in tight rows, each having five rooms and
"conveniences." For each of these cottages $18 rent a month was charged.
The city of Chicago, the officials of which were but the mannikins or
hirelings of the industrial magnates, generously supplied the Pullman
Company with water at four cents a thousand gallons. For this same water
the company charged its employees ten cents a thousand gallons, or about
seventy-one cents a month. By this plan the company, in addition,
obtained its water supply for practically nothing. Even for having
shutters on the houses the workers were taxed fifty cents a month. These
are some specimens of the company's many devious instrumentalities for
enchaining and plundering its thousands of workers.

In the panic year of 1893 the Pullman Company reduced wages one-fourth,
yet the cost of rent, water, gas--of nearly all other fundamental
necessities--remained the same. As the average yearly pay of at least
4,497 of the company's wage workers was little more than $600--or, to be
exact, $613.86--this reduction, in a large number of cases, was
equivalent to forcing these workers to yield up their labors for
substantially nothing. Numerous witnesses testified before the special
commission appointed later by President Cleveland, that at times their
bi-weekly checks ran variously from four cents to one dollar. The
company could not produce evidence to disprove this. These sums
represented the company's indebtedness to them for their labor, after
the company had deducted rent and other charges. Such manifold robberies
aroused t