transgressions. They gouge a mate with a dull knife, or beat his head in
with an iron pot, and then sit down and wait for the police. Wife-beating
is the masculine prerogative of matrimony. They wear remarkable boots of
brass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their
children with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to
trample her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.

A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husband
as is the Indian squaw. And I, for one, were I a woman and had but the
two choices, should prefer being a squaw. The men are economically
dependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent on
the men. The result is, the woman gets the beating the man should give
his master, and she can do nothing. There are the kiddies, and he is the
bread-winner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and
children to starve. Evidence to convict can rarely be obtained when such
cases come into the courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is
weeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off
for the kiddies' sakes.

The wives become screaming harridans or, broken-spirited and doglike,
lose what little decency and self-respect they have remaining over from
their maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their degradation
and dirt.

Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed
misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are exaggerated,
that I am too close to the picture and lack perspective. At such moments
I find it well to turn to the testimony of other men to prove to myself
that I am not becoming over-wrought and addle-pated. Frederick Harrison
has always struck me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and he
says:-

To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as
hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of
industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent. of the
actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own
beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room
that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind, except as
much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the precarious chance
of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are
housed, for the most part, in places that