to even half exist, they must live up to the last penny of it, so that a week's wages, $5.00, is all that stands between this family and pauperism or starvation. The thing happens, the father is struck down, and what then? A mother with three children can do little or nothing. Either she must hand her children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be free to do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay and death end their suffering.
To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current newspapers the two following cases. A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion receive 17 cents per gross for making boxes. They made each day four gross. Their expenses were 16 cents for carfare, 4 cents for stamps, 5 cents for glue, and 2 cents for string, so that all they earned between them was 42 cents, or a daily wage each of 21 cents.
