coarse—the very cheapest forms of meat, and usually stale bread. Butter was a superfluous luxury. The morning meal was made up of a chunk of bread washed down with "coffee"—adulterated stuff with just a faint odor of real coffee. At noon, bread and an onion, or a bit of herring, or a slice of cheap cheese composed their dinner, with perhaps a dash of dessert in the shape of sweetened substance, artificially colored, sold as "cake." For supper, cheap pork, or a soup bone, garnished occasionally in the season by stale vegetables, and accompanied by a concoction resembling tea. Few of these workers ever had more than one suit of clothes, or more than one dress. They could not afford amusements, and were too fatigued to read or converse. At night bunches of them bunked together—sometimes eight or ten in a single room; by this arrangement the rent of each was proportionately reduced.
It is now we come to a sinister result of these methods of exploiting the wage-working girls and women. The subject is one that cannot be approached with other than considerable hesitancy, not because the facts are untrue, but because its statistical nature has not been officially investigated. Nevertheless, the facts are known; stern, inflexible facts. For true historical accuracy, as well as for purposes of humanity, they must be given; that delicacy would be false, misleading and palliative which would refrain from tearing away the veil and from exposing the putridity beneath.
Field was repeatedly charged with employing his workers at such desperately low wages as to drive large numbers of girls and women, by the terrifying force of poverty, into the alternative of prostitution. How large the number has been, or precisely what the economic or psychologic factors have been, we have no means of knowing. It is worth noting that many official investigations, futile though their results, have probed into many other phases of capitalist fraud. But the department stores over the country have been a singular exception.