White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy PoorBanks, Louis Albert
History
White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor
Banks, Louis Albert
Poor -- Massachusetts -- Boston; Sweatshops; Working class -- Massachusetts -- Boston
If some of these money kings who have made their millions by the
oppression of the poor, in mines, and mills, and factories, were
suddenly called to face the bones of the dead who have gone to their
graves from weary, unrequited slavery, in order for their financial
triumph, they would stand back aghast at the price of their own
success.
It is this worship of the gold god which is at the bottom of all the
wrongs which have been pointed out in this series of discourses. The
wealthy merchant who pays the poor widow one cent apiece for making
white aprons, and by his avarice and his lust induces the young women
who sell them to eke out their scanty wages by the sale of their honor,
is a worshipper of the gold god. The sweater who parcels out his work
through the miserable tenement houses, grinding the face of the poor to
the very last degree possible with physical existence,--indeed, many
times beyond the possibility of existence, except when helped by
charity,--is an obsequious devotee at the altar of Mammon. The
chattel-mortgage shark, who watches all the necessities of the poor as
anxiously as ever a hawk watched over a helpless or crippled bird, and
the liquor-seller, who fills his coffers by a traffic which injures and
destroys the health, the intelligence, and the morality of all the
people whom he can draw into his net, investing all his cunning in
methods to entrap the unwary, and gloating over the increasing appetite
and the devilish passion for strong drink in his victims, are only
brothers to the others who gather to pay their devotions to the god of
gold.
[Illustration: FOUR SHINERS.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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