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Home  »  The Battle with the Slum  »  Page 196

Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.

Page 196

we are at it yet. While I am writing a Tuberculosis Committee is at work sifting the facts of tenement-house life as they bear on that peril. A Child Labor Committee is preparing to attack the slum in its centre, as we stopped the advance guard when we made the double-decker unprofitable. The factory inspector is gathering statistics of earnings and hours of labor in sweat shop and tenement to throw light on the robbery that goes on there. When they have told us what they have to tell, it may be that we shall be able to say to the manufacturer: “You shall not send out goods to be made in sweat shop or tenement. You shall make them in your own shop or not at all.” He will not be hurt, for all will have to do alike. I am rather inclined to think that he will be glad to take that way out of a grisly plight.
 
 
Label of Consumers’ League.
 
  For he has seen the signs of a flank movement that goes straight for his pocket-book, an organized public sentiment that is getting ready to say to him, “We will buy no clothes or wear them, or any other thing whatsoever, that is made at the price of the life and hope of other men or women.” Wherever I went last winter, through the length and breadth of the land, women were stirring to organize branches of the Consumers’ League. True, they were the well-to-do, not yet the majority. But they were the very ones who once neither