only $10 a month, there was an
exceptional air of cheerfulness and interest among the workers. This was
due to no special privileges of theirs, but to the contagious spirit of
personal interest and kindness inherent in all the Sisters in charge.

"The bitterness that characterized workers living in the hospitals was
observed by Miss Hopkins among the laundry workers living in the
hotels."

III

"The twenty-one hotels where we conducted our inquiry were extremely
varied, ranging from a yellow brick house near the Haymarket, with red
and blue ingrain carpets and old-fashioned bells that rang a gong when
one twisted a knob, to the mosaic floors and the pale, shaded electric
lights of the most costly establishments in New York.

"As to the sanitation of the twenty hotels visited, only six had their
laundries above ground. All the others were in basements or in cellars.
In most of these the ventilation was faulty and the air at times
intolerably hot. It is a striking fact--showing what intelligent modern
regulation can accomplish--that one laundry two stories underground in
New York was so high-ceiled and the summer cold-air apparatus so complete
that it was comfortable even in the hot months. In most of the hotel
laundries there were seats for the takers-off. Only three of the
laundries had wet floors; only three were dirty; only one had an
insanitary lavatory and toilet room.

"In regard to the danger of injury, of the nineteen mangles that I
inspected for dangerous conditions, six were insufficiently protected. It
is the custom in most hotels, when an article winds around the cylinder
of the mangle, to pluck it off while the mangle is in motion. The women
sometimes climb up on the mangle and reach over, in imminent danger of
becoming entangled either by their dresses catching or by pitching
forward. The machinery of hotel laundries is even less carefully guarded
than is that of a commercial laundry, and in some establishments is,
besides, dangerously crowded. This was the case in one laundry in a hotel
cellar. I worked here at the ironing-table on a consignment of suits from
the navy-yard. As work came in from outside the hotel, the establishment
should have been under the State inspection. The rooms were narrow. There
was a ventilating fan, placed very low, near where the girls hung their
wraps, and as soon as I came in, they warned me that it caught up in its
blades and destroyed anything that came near it. The