m me. He
was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one
condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he
was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they
were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants,
all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them
all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy
was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at
just one thing--sleeves, pockets, buttonholes--some small part of one
garment, and never learned anything else.

"This I do," he explained, "to prevent them from going on strike with the
hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can't. They don't know enough.
Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my
shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I
have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in
different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that
they shall have no chance to learn."

Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for
removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. "Now," he said, "this boy is
not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here
and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is
old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not
better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!" And this
successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.
It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the
"immorality" of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as "a blot on
humanity."

CHAPTER VII.

THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS

On my way to the office the other day, I came upon three boys sitting on a
beer-keg in the mouth of a narrow alley intent upon a game of cards. They
were dirty and "tough." The bare feet of the smallest lad were nearly
black with dried mud. His hair bristled, unrestrained by cap or covering
of any kind. They paid no attention to me when I stopped to look at them.
It was an hour before noon.

"Why are you not in school?" I asked of the oldest rascal. He might have
been thirteen.

"'Cause," he retorted calmly, without taking his eye off his neighbor's
cards, "'cause I don't believe in it. Go on, Jim!"

I caught the black-footed one by