“What does it mean?” I asked, and I realized that not only the mother but every one of the five children were listening. “It means that we’ve got to have our share, that’s what it means.” Though his words were emphatic he was not the least bit rude, for my being a wage-earner insured my sympathy with his point of view. “I’m tired seeing my missus skimp and slave, and not have a second frock to her back, nor a second pair of shoes, like she done before the war. She’s got glad rags now, not so many of ’em, but I’m going to see that she gets more. Well, she can’t get more if the builder and contractor pockets all the profits while we workers hardly gets our salt.” “It ain’t that so much—my having Sunday clothes,” the mother put in, as, having helped herself to a boiled potato and gravy she took her seat. “It’s the children. They’re growing up and I wants they should have good food and a chance to get through school before they goes to work.” “Through high school, mum,” the eldest girl corrected. “I want to be a teacher.” Another time I lunched with a family of which the father was a plumber and at table. It is an unusual occurrence, or was at that time, to find the man of the house at home in the middle of the day, except on Saturdays and Sundays. “Yes, wages is coming down some, and I’m willing they should,” he told me, looking over the rim of his saucer, from which he was drinking steaming-hot coffee. “What I ain’t willing is they should cut from the bottom more than from the top. There ain’t no sense in my boss paying me two dollars for doing work on which he collects twenty or more from a house-owner. ’Tain’t a fair division, and none of us is going to stand for it.” Again the education of their children came up. There were four sons, and the eldest was attending the Stuyvesant High School with the intention of becoming an engineer. The mother explained that she was loath to allow the boy to enter for this additional training when he might have had his working papers and gotten a good job. “What’s the use of us working if we can’t get better for our children than we had ourselves?” the husband cut in on her plaintive fears. “I always wanted to do something,” he explained to me. “I wanted to build houses. I’d got a bit handy with a saw and a hammer; they was all the tools I could borrow, when my father lost his job and I had to go to work. I had to take the best thing I could get—helper to a sort of half-way plumber. For a long time I used to think I’d change, but the chance never come my way. I’m bound my boy shall, though.” “We’re for a minimum wage if they’ll make it high enough and cut the maximum low enough,” a young Jewess, an operator in a shirt-waist factory, told me one evening when chance brought us together in adjoining seats in the top gallery of a Broadway theatre. “What do you mean by cutting the maximum low enough?” I questioned.