Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1891 — The Working Momen of New York. [ARTICLE]

The Working Momen of New York.

The statement is made by Mr. fius, in a recently published work, that there are about 150,000 honest women in New York City who, by working fifteen hours or more a day, can earn barely 60 cents daily. This figure seems very loty, indeed, when it is remembered that the expense of living in a city like New York is much higher than In smaller towns and in country districts. Sixty cents a day in New York means hardly as much as 30 cents in any small country town. What renders the plight of these poor, hard-working women of New York still more pitiable is the fact that the money which they do earn is by the Mc-

Kinley tariff law made less effective in buying the necessaries of life than it was before. Duties have been wantonly in* creased on many articles of prime necessity to them, and they are even told that these McKinley duties are in the interests of the laboring people. This year the potato crop of this country is a partial failure, large supplies must be brought in from Canada at an extra McKinley tariff cost of 25 cents a bushel, add to poor women in the sad situation just described 25 cents on a single bushel of potatoes is no small matter. True, McKinley imposes this duty on potatoes Upon the pretense of helping our farmers; but it is an insult to our farmers to claim that they need a duty which lays such burdens upon the poor of the cities. * The most burdensome provision of the McKinley law upon these women, however, is the tax on all kinds of clothing and of cloth from which to make it What is still more cruel is the fact that the very heaviest duties are in nearly every case imposed on the cheapest grades of cloth, whether woolen, cotton, or linen. > What the women of the slums of New York, the hundred and fifty thousand who labor day and night to keep soul and body together on sixty cents a day, or in many cases on half that amount, would be likely to think of that policy of protection which, for the sake of “infant in4ustrfe#, a which are tn "lhanyjcases already the strongest in the world, keeps their wages down and the price of necessities of life up, is not perhaps of much matter. They are not educated in the consideration of great questions of economics, and if they were they have no time to think of anything. If they had, they might conclude that it was, on the whole, best to kill themseives. The question is, however, what do the men and women who are living in comfort think of it? Can they feel that so long as they aid in the support of the monstrosity called protection, that Frankenstein, which threatens the very life of the Republic, they are free of blood guiltiness concerning these poor creat-i ures working and suffering in the slams?