CHAPTER XXVII.
She paused, and laid her hand upon
her bosom, and in that moment—was it
a dream, an omen?—a shadow flung by
the dark wing of an overshadowing fate?
In that moment, between me and Eugenia,
there came, or seemed to come, the
image of my hag-wife, hideous and scowling,
followed by Eva, beautiful as ever
but with sadness and reproach in her
eyes. It was for a moment only. It
was as palpable and vivid as an object
brought out from intense darkness, for
an instant, by a flash of lightning.
Eugenia broke the silence, as she rose
from her chair, and placed a small book,
a thin volume, bound in a brown cover,
in my hands.
“Read this,” she said, “and then say
whether it is well that one of my social
condition should link her life with a man
of your wealth. It is a little book, but
it says a great deal.”
Wondering I took the book; opened it,
and glanced over its pages. It was a little
book, composed of a few pages of formal
manuscript, and yet it did say a great
deal. There was a world of meaning in
its cramped, formal pages. It was the
book in which were kept the accounts of
Eugenia and her employer.
For a week's labor of sixteen hours a
day, employed upon the finest kind of
needlework, Eugenia received just two
dollars and a half—so said the book. A
week's labor, that taxed eye and hand,
and lungs, to their utmost, repaid with
twenty shillings, to speak in the dialect
of New-York! And for every dollar that
the embroideress received, her employer,
by the sale of the production of her
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needle, received his ten dollars! I could
not help throwing the account book on
the table, with a gesture of indignation
and contempt.
“Behold the justice of society to its
weakest and most helpless members!”
I ejaculated. “For the same amount of
labor, expended in any branch of mechanics
or manufactures, a man would receive
at least one dollar per day! But woman
is weak, she is defenceless, she can be
robbed with impunity!—”
“Or—” Eugenia interrupted me, her
eyes downcast, and her neck and face all
crimson, for the moment—“Or, if she
does not choose to lead this kind of life,
there is yet open to her another career.
That of the poor girl by whose hands
Burley Hayne met his fate! But you
are surprised at the record of my labors.
Here is a book which will surprise you
more. It is a book lent to me by a poor
seamstress, who works for the proprietor
of a clothing store—” and she placed the
second book in my hands.
Talk of black slavery! In what respect
can it rival with the white slavery,
a portion only of whose unutterable horrors
was detailed in the cramped figures
of the book which I held—a slavery
which, in order to make clothing cheap,
works up the heart and lungs and life of
poor womanhood into garments for the
nobler sex at—just sixteen pennies per
day!—a slavery which does not fall upon
an inferior race, abounding in rude physical
life—in rude happy animal life; nor
upon strong men, able to buffet and to
bear misfortune, but upon women, refined,
delicate women, rendered sensitive by
education and religion—women, fit to be
mothers, wives, sisters, daughters of the
best of you, O noble, disinterested masculine
sex!
Unroof New-York, and in her darkest
haunts you will find a thousand women
fit by nature to fulfil the highest duties
of woman's life, but who, by the wagessystem
of this great Christian city, have
been consigned to that death of the soul
which is a thousand fold more horrible
than the death which lays the body in
the coffin and the grave.
“Well, Eugenia!” I said, flinging the
accursed book to the floor—“it is in my
heart to kneel at your feet, and in you
worship the enshrined images of holy
poverty and spotless virtue! You not
worthy of my hand. O would to heaven
I was worthy of yours!”
Here let “The Man of the World”
pause in his narrative for a little while,
while the editor of these papers intrudes
upon the reader a few thoughts suggested
by the facts just stated—facts which
tell of the awful contrasts presented by
the Wealth and Poverty of a great city
like New-York.
It is a pitiful thing that, side by side
with the most splendid victories won by
our modern civilization over dumb matter,
Poverty marches steadily on, like a
skeleton at the shoulder of the voluptuous
queen of some banquet-hall.
Look around you! and you behold
everywhere the trophies of enterprise—
edifices whose majestic architecture rivals
the wonders of old Rome—telegraphs
that annihilate space—Ericsson inventions,
that revolutionize the industrial
interests of an entire age. And look before
you! and there are little children, in
rags and naked feet, sweeping the crossings
of the streets.
On one hand, the St. Nicholas Hotel
and Grace Church; on the other, the
Five Points.
Why these contrasts? Can it be true,
as gravely asserted by sleek gentlemen,
with well developed physical organizations,
and good accounts at bank, that no
one is poor but those who deserve to be
so? That success is the test of virtue;
the want of it, the badge of crime?
Talk like this may do for a couple of
portly gentlemen, gravely engaged at
beefsteak and old Port; or for some editorling,
whose inquiries into life and its
mysteries have never led him to a higher
aspiration than a seat at the opera. But
for those who see misery everywhere;
see it livid, half-naked, and more horrible
to look upon, because it is everywhere
contrasted with enormous wealth and
boundless luxury—those who, thus seeing
it and confronted by it at every turn,
are either hardened into callousness or
wrung with perpetual anguish by the
sight—the doctrine of portly gentlemen
and editorling will by no means suffice.
Once admit that wealth is the unfailing
sign of virtue; poverty, the brand of
crime, and you write “felon” on the foreheads
of the noblest men, whose glorious
names brighten along the pathway of
ages.
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Nay; you put the brand of infamy
upon a life whose every detail was
but an exemplification, in the most unutterably
touching form, of the divine gospel
of self-denial; a life which made poverty
holy, and failure godlike; a life
which begun with the calm hymn of
“Good tidings to the poor!” yet ended
with that burst of unutterable anguish,
“Eli! Eli! lama sabachthani!”
That life was designed as a lesson, as
an example, as a consolation, to all the
sons of men, in and through all time; it
was that holy, beautiful life—intended as
an embodiment of humanity, in its deepest
sorrows and loftiest yearnings, walking
patiently the fire-paved track of poverty
and suffering; and when you say to
the poor man, “Your poverty is the result
of crime;” to the unsuccessful,
“Your failure is the effect of your own
sins,” your brutal taunt falls not only
upon the poor and unsuccessful, but upon
His forehead who is the master of us all.
You mock God, and in his place enthrone
Mammon, that lowest of all the devils,
who, while his prouder compeers stood
erect, blasted but defiant, went crawling
on all fours in search of pennies.
“Any one who does right can get
along. It's only the idle, the improvident,
or the criminal, who are poor.”
This, reader, is not the sentiment of a
professed atheist, but of a large number
of good folks, who dress well, eat well,
sleep well, and rather think themselves
the exact models of respectability and
virtue. Let us try their doctrine a
moment.
If, though the rain and sleet of this
drear winter night, you will look into
yonder—hovel? no, but huge mansion,
rising in the heart of the great city, and
tenanted by at least a hundred of the
most miserable of the poor—if you will
cast your gaze into a particular room,
lighted by a single candle, you will behold
a pale woman working with her
needle.
A woman in suffering; but a girl,
scarcely more than a child in years;
eyes glaring feverishly in their hollow
sockets, cheeks sunken, lips pinched and
white, and the dead, blank look of misery
and want on every lineament.
This girl-woman, by the death of her
father, a hard-working laborer, who all
his life toiled late and early for rent
money and bread; and, when he could
work no more, died, has become the only
protector and hope of the brother and
sister, little children, whom you may see
sleeping now upon the bed in yonder
corner of the miserable room. To keep
them in bread and home, the girl-woman
works at her needle sixteen hours a day—
works until pulse is feverish, eyes hot
and dim, and lungs heavy as lead—for
which she gets per day from sixteen to
twenty-five pennies; from whom, we
will not say, for we wish to spare the
feelings of the sleek gentlemen who work
up the lungs and lives of women into
merchandize. Well, sixteen pennies per
day is rather small capital upon which
the girl-woman is to support herself, and
feed and clothe her orphan brother and
sister. Even the sixteen pennies will
not last long, for the consumption is busy
at the life of the girl-woman; in a little
while there will be a grave dug for her.
Now, gentle and comfortable people,
who smack your lips as you say,—“Any
one that is not idle and improvident can
get along; the idle, the improvident, the
criminal only, are poor”—will you tell
us the particular sin of this girl-woman,
who is now digging her grave with her
needle? You can hear her grave-cough,
as, for an instant, she stops in her work
and looks up with her feverish eyes.
The particular sin of this girl, if you
please?
Life has never disclosed to her any of
its blossoms—nothing but its thorns.
The joys of love, the name of wife, the
holy wealth of motherhood can never be
hers. She is dedicating herself to death,
for the support of her brother and sister.
Now, of what sin is she guilty? Speak
out, sleek gentlemen!
Was it a sin in her that her father,
unable to work any longer, fell sick and
died?
When she is dead, the boy and girl,
her brother and sister, will be cast friendless
upon the world, without education
or hope, the boy to end, it may be, one
winter's day, in the open square within
the Tombs, the rope about his neck and
the gibbit over his head; the girl to
come at last to a death-bed by which will
sit no comforters but dishonor and
shame.
Now, will you, complacent gentlemen,
tell us what sin it is of this orphan boy
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and girl, that, by father and sister's
death, they are cast adrift upon the
world? Their poverty is the effect of
their sin, you know—that is your doctrine—
tell us the particular sin?
But, say you, this case is exceptional,
and button your pockets over your well
filled purses. Exceptional! O most
convenient loop-hole! through which
you can creep to escape the consequences
of your infernal dogma.
This case is not exceptional. It is the
case, in some shape or other, of one-half
at least of the large city's poor—poor,
who are poor through no fault of theirs,
but who work straight on for bread as
long as life's daylight holds out. At the
worst, scarcely one-fourth of the poor
are poor from their own fault. Bring
out your statistics; lift the veil which
hides the secrets of society; and you
will find this to be a truth, hard even
for you to get over.
But, taking the other side of your
dogma, by which you all, complacent
gentlemen, tell us, in effect, if not in so
many words—that wealth is the sign of
a virtuous life, spent in honest effort—
you will allow us to pause a moment,
while we endeavor to believe that you
are not in earnest—that this dogma is
only a joke of yours, a very brutal joke,
yet still intended for a joke.
Wealth always, or in one case out of
three, the symbol of a virtuous life spent
in honest effort!
Horrible mockery! Where is the
man who dares trace to their real source
five out of ten of the great fortunes of
this metropolis? The man does not
live who dares do it. And if such a
man did live, his disclosures, or rather
his analysis, would cause him to be
hunted forth like a wild beast from the
pale of city civilization.
Lippard, George, 1822-1854 [1853], The midnight queen, or, Leaves from New York life. (Garrett & Co., 18 Ann street, New York) [word count] [eaf630T].
