nineteenth century a farm hand was paid $3.00 a month. A strong boy A strong boy could be had for $1.00 a month. Women who went out to service received $10.00 a year. Type setters were given $1.00 per day. A woman by hard work at the spinning wheel could make twelve cents per day. The hours of work were from sunrise to sunset, and, as the sun rose later and set earlier in the Winter than in Summer, wages in December were one-third less than in July. On such pittances it was only by the strictest economy that a mechanic could keep his children from starvation and himself from jail.

Poor Debtor Acts.

Another view of the condition of the poor-in this country as well as in England-may be obtained from a study of the criminal laws that existed up to less than a century ago. In the United States, for example, the law permitted what might practically be termed life imprisonment for debt. Thus, a man who was arrested upon the complaint of a creditor was lodged in jail and kept there until the indebtedness was paid, and it was not until the passage of the Poor Debtor Acts that this evil was abolished. It has been estimated thatas late as 1829-in Massachusetts,, New York and Pennsylvania alone, more than twenty thousand persons were in prison because of non-payment of debts, most of them being for small amounts. John Mitchell, in his book, "Organized Labor," states that the average per capita indebtedness of 1,085 prisoners confined in a Philadelphia prison was less than $24.00. Yet this was but a little more than eighty years ago.

The poor of England were not only subject to all the abuses of imprisonment for debt, but all penalties were so severe that those who, driven by starva

tion, were caught violating the statutes against poaching and pilfering, seldom escaped with their lives.

"In 1769," according to Blackstone, "among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than 160 have been declared to be felonies without benefit of clergy." These actions included various offences that would properly be classed under the general term of "poaching," which punished with death the unauthorized person who "appeared where hares were kept," or who invaded the boundary hedges and fences of deer parks, etc. The law punished so indiscriminately that children of executed twelve years were without mercy for trivial offences.

The Pauper Children.

In fact, there was little sympathy for childhood in "Merrie England," until well after the first quarter of the nineteenth century. As Gibbins said, in "Industry in England":

"The manufacturers largely employed pauper children. The mill owners systematically communicated with the overseers of the poor who arranged a day for the inspection of pauper children. Those chosen by the manufacturer were then conveyed in wagons or canal-boats to their destination and from that motimes regular traffickers would take the ment were doomed to slavery. Someplace of the manufacturers and transfer a number of children to a factory district and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar, till they could hand them over to some mill owner in want of hands, who would come and examine the children as to their height, strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave owner in American markets. After that these children were simply at the mercy of their owner-nominally as apprentices, but in reality-as mere slaves

who got no wages and whom it was not worth while to clothe and feed properly because they were so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. . . . Their treatment was most inhuman. The hours of their labor was limited only by exhaustion after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Illness was no excuse. No child was accounted ill until it was positively impossible to force. him to continue to labor.. . . Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and night. On Sundays they were made to clean machinery."

Child Labor in England.

Alfred, in "The History of the Factory Movement," tells a similar story:

"In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural

Bedroom in Improved Tenement.

Sink in Old-Style Tenement--without Plumbing Connections.

activity by lows of the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlookers and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness. . They were

fed upon the coarsest food, often with the same which served for the pigs of their masters. They slept by turns and in relays in filthy beds which were never cool, for one set of children were sent to sleep in them as soon as the others had gone to their daily, or nightly, toil.

A Hot-Bed of Contagion.

There was often no discrimination of the sexes and diseases and misery grew as in a hot-bed of contagion. ... Sometimes these miserable beings tried to run away. To prevent this, irons were rivetted on their ankles, with long links reaching up to the hips-and young women, girls and boys were compelled to work and to sleep in these chains. Many died and were secretly buried at night lest people should notice the number of graves. Many committed suicide."

Compare these conditions with those which now exist and it will be possible to gain an approximately correct idea of the distance we have travelled toward the solution of the child labor problem. By this I do not mean to suggest that conditions today are beyond criticism. It is a disgrace to our civilization that child labor should not be so restricted by strictly enforced laws that it would be prohibited in all industries during the tender years of childhood, yet when we contrast the terrible pictures that Gibbins and Alfred paint, even the most redical opponent of child labor is compelled to admit that we have here another evidence of conspicuous social progress.

The Housing Problem.

The housing problem has also come to be a burning one, both in Europe and America, during the past half-century. Miss Octavia Hill was the London pioneer in tenement reform. In 1864, she persuaded John Ruskin to purchase a piece of property which included a number of neglected tenements, promising

him that the rents would make the experiment a profitable one. As a social reformer, the idea appealed to Ruskin. He watched Miss Hill's plan with interest and the result was so satisfactory that he later assisted her to devote he life to that work. She purchased buildings that were badly out of repair, especially those occupied by very poor peɔple. The houses were then put in order. and, if the tenants proved themselves. capable of taking care of them, new conveniences were introduced.

The first "model dwelling" in the United States was erected less than forty years ago in New York City by the Workmen's Home Association, a soci

ety organized by the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, yet this soon became one of the worst tenements in the city, so crude were the ideas of that day. What conditions must have been in the large cities prior to that time it would be difficult to imagine if Dr. John H. Griscom had not given us so graphic an under-pictur of the habitations of the poor in 1845:

In New York Cellars.

"The most offensive places of residence are the cellars," he said. "It is almost impossible when contemplating the circumstances and conditions of the poor who inhabit these holes, to maintain the proper degree of calmness requisite for a thorough inspection of their miseries, and sound judgment respecting them. You must descend to them; you must feel the blasts of foul air as it meets your face on opening the door; you must grope in the dark, or hesitate until your eyes become accustomed to the gloomy place, to enable you to find your way through the entry over the broken floor, the boards of which are protected from your tread by half an inch of hard dirt; you must inhale the suffocating vapor of the heated rooms, and in the dim recesses endeavor to find the inmates by the sound of their voices, or chance to see their figures moving between you and the flickering light of a window, coated with dirt and festooned with cob-webs-or, if in search of an invalid-take care that you do not fall full length upon the bed with her, by stumbling against the bundle of rags and straw dignified by that name, lying upon the floor, under the window, if window there is; and all this and much more beyond the reach of my pen must be felt and seen ere you can appreciate in its full force the mournful and disgusting conditions in which thousands of the subjects of our Government pass their lives."

"Sanitary Condition."

If the cellars were indescribably vile, however, plenty of the tenements were not much better, and many years passed before great improvements were made in the methods of housing those whose meagre wage compelled them to dwell where the rent was cheapest. Today, however, it would be difficult to find a dwelling place that resembled the disease-breeding spot described by Dr. Griscom, and, as will be shown in subsequent articles, the work of the tenement house. commissioners, and the efforts of the charity organizations, have already accomplished such remarkable results in meeting the problems of congestion that it is reasonably safe to assume that the day is not far distant when unhealthful tenements will be no more than an unsavory memory.

Although it is impossible, in a single article, to do more than suggest the lines

along which an investigation of this kind should be pursued, enough facts have already been discovered to show clearly. that the Socialist contention regarding the enslavement of the wage-earner and the misery of his condition is entirely without justification. All things are not as they should be today, but they are incalculably better than they were fifty years ago and are steadily getting better.

This is the perspective from which we should view life. It is to say the least, "unscientific" to exaggerate the weak spots in present-day civilization to such an extent as to lead to the assumption that the condition criticised is the worst that has ever been known, when a few hours devoted to the study of history will disclose the fact that conditions are now infinitely less oppressive than they were when our fathers and grandfathers managed the world's affairs.