Twelve cents a day kept most of them. When they didn't manage seven cents for a bunk, they "carried the banner"--walked the streets or stood in a "dead-house" saloon, where there are no seats and where a man must stand. Many of them, when worsted completely, would "hit the bread-line," after midnight, not so much for the bread as for a place to stand where they would be immune from the policeman's club. Despite some plain lessons to the contrary, I believed most of them to be victims of laziness; but in a single year twelve of them dropped on the floor dead: to these I gave the benefit of the doubt. "_The Hardest Work Is No Work at All_" One Sunday night I told a hundred men in the Bismarck that the reason they had no work was, that they were loafers and didn't want work. This was in accordance with my theory--the prevailing theory--that poverty is the child of sin, that lack of work is the fruit of shiftlessness. I offered to change clothes with any man in the house, and to go out in the world and show him how to get a job. The challenge was accepted instantly--by an Irishman. I wisely changed the article of agreement regarding clothes; I got up my own outfit! Next morning, at half-past five, I met Tim, the man who had accepted the challenge, and we proceeded to the labor-market. From the "want" columns of the morning papers we selected a few bits of labor bait. We ran them down, failed to find anything, and turned to the shops and factories on the West Side. The answers were monotonous. "Full up," they said, or a card at the door or gate announced that the firm had a "full complement." I felt like a mendicant. I found myself begging for work in a subservient tone and manner. In one place, I remember, I said, "For God's sake." The superintendent laughed and waved us away. "The harrudest work, for sure, is no worruk at all, at all!" said my companion, by way of sympathy. It was mid-afternoon; I was growing desperate with my sense of failure, and at this point I launched a scheme which had been growing in my mind for hours. "Keep close to me now, Tim," I said, and I led him into a drug-store at the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery. "Sir," I said to the clerk, "you are not accustomed to giving credit, I know; but perhaps you might suspend your rule for once and trust a stranger for a very small sum?" "What is't?" asked the clerk, with something of a sneer. "I am hungry and thirsty. I have looked for work since five o'clock, and have utterly failed to find it. Now I have a scheme; I know it will work. Oxalic acid eats away rust. If I had five cents' worth, I could make a dollar an hour--I know I could." The clerk listened and looked. He was good enough to say that I didn't talk like a bum, though I looked like one. He inquired anxiously if I was "off my hook." At last he said: "By ----! I've been on the Bowery a long time, and haven't been sold once. If you're a skin-game man, I'll throw up my job!" I got the acid.