Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/406

 392 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Saturday is always a very long day and Sunday is shorter than the regular week day. The following table shows the wages paid these boys in addition to their board and clothes is from $15 to $20 a month :

TABLE SHOWING WAGES PAID GREEK BOOTBLACKS IN LOOP DIS- TRICT IN CHICAGO

Number receiving $i2.5o-$is per month 11

Number receiving $is-$20 per month 20

Number receiving over $20 per month 7

Number not receiving wages 3

Total 41

An employer who has a large establishment or several small ones, as many of them do, has to provide housing facilities for a number of boys. One man, for example, has eleven rooms — two floors and the basement — for twenty-five boys. The rooms are clean and neatly furnished and the food abundant. Another has eleven rooms for twenty boys with an old Greek man in charge as cook. This place is not clean. There is no furniture except beds and a long table in an inside room which serves as a dining-room. Here the boys were found one night between half-past nine and ten o'clock. They had just returned from work and were eating their supper of soup and stewed com.

The danger of this life can be readily understood. The boys spend nearly all their waking hours at work. They live, as many of the poor must, near immoral neighborhoods and are easily accessible to men and women who wish to accomplish their ruin. They have no time for regular attendance at even- ing classes or clubs, no normal home life or relationships. But for the discipline of the bosses who want them to be ready for work the next day an even larger number would find excitement and relaxation in dangerous amusements.

Hard as the lot of these boys is, it is better than that of the young apprentice in Greece.^ ^ This accounts for the fact that the parents of the boys as well as the boys themselves are satis- fied with the terms on which they work and consider deporta-

^ Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1909 p. 129.