Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/579

Rh and wife work alternately eighteen hours a day. Some button makers receive 60 cents per week.

People take work home with them from some of the lace factories.

Around perhaps the only table in the only room, in a little house, the family assemble, the man, his wife, the grandparents and children with other members of the family, if there be any. When evening comes on, an oil lamp, a candle, or even chips of wood are the only lights by which they can work. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays the finished articles are taken to the factories and paid for.

"It is very hard now," said one of the lace exporters from Neudek the other day, "to get people in summer to make laces. They prefer to go to work in fields or picking hops, for which they get higher wages than by making laces. Children get 8 cents a day at that time and adults from 25 cents to even 40 cents, and of course we can not afford to pay such high wages for lace making."

Austria-Hungary's housing problem becomes acute in her city and factory districts. In 1900, 43 per cent. (592,134 persons) of the inhabitants of Vienna lived in houses of one room, exclusive of kitchen. In E Reichenberg, a decade earlier, 57.5 per cent, of the dwellings, and in the suburbs 79.2 per cent., were without kitchens. In many of these houses the inmates did their manufacturing work. Similar conditions were found throughout the empire. Conditions in Reichenberg have not materially changed since 1890, but lately in other parts of Austria and Hungary a strong movement has set in for the erection of suitable dwellings for the poorer classes. The chief improvements are in the size of rooms, lighting, ventilation and rate of rent rather than in the number of rooms. Many of the model flats have but one room and an attic or one room and a kitchen. In some places tenants are forbidden to take lodgers. The government encourages the building of homes of a certain specified desirable type by exempting the builders from certain forms of taxation. In several cases model houses are rented at such a figure as to yield but 3 per cent, on the investment.

Italy has more than 650 mills for the manufacture of cotton fabrics. By far the larger part are in northern Italy, but the government is trying to increase the number of mills in southern Italy.

Labor is cheaper in the south, but it is also less efficient and mills are there farther from their sources of supply. The number of mills in the south may, however, be expected to increase. Wages in the