292 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
protest, no doubt, is necessary in some quarters ; but to one who has spent more or less time during the summer season in the slums of London, New York, and Chicago the crying need of "race-limitation" must be apparent. The high rate of infant mortality saves the slums. This opinion may savor of brutish- ness, but it is born of common-sense. Once I saw a little baby die in a small room in a rear tenement, where the mother, her sister, and two older children were finishing Ascot ties at two and a half cents a dozen, and the mercury stood at ninety- six degrees. The mother had the baby on her lap, and she was working half an hour before its little life ebbed out. She screamed with grief for a few minutes, and then she said : "Thank God it's gone! I couldn't take care of it." In a few months there was another, and the struggle still goes on. All sweaters, however, are not in such dire straits as these, but they are working under the worst possible conditions.
My interest in this particular phase of industry was first actively aroused during the summer of 1900, when I visited some fifty or sixty sweat-shops in New York for the Tenement House Commission. 1 My work was insignificant compared with that of others, but full of significance to me in that it revealed a hitherto undreamed of condition of toil for thousands of unskilled workers. My official visits were to the necktie workers entirely, and each morning before starting out I carefully scanned the board of health reports so that I might avoid the neighbor- hood of contagious diseases; but, in spite of my vigilance, on more than one occasion I found measles and scarlet-fever patients in or very near the domestic workshop; yet the sewing went on as usual. Now, someone bought those neckties bearing the germs of disease, and so an innocent victim of the greed for gain may have paid the penalty.
But all of this is not pleasant to think upon. Factory inspectors' reports have told the tale of the spread of loathsome diseases by means of garments made in the home workshop, and notable among these is the special report on smallpox by Mrs. Florence Kelley, of Illinois, in 1894. But a very small
1 Acting under appointment of Governor Roosevelt.
