Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/100

 92 THE LAND QUESTION.

Is it real advance in civilization which, on the one hand, produces these great captains of industry, and, on the other, these social outcasts ?

It is the year of grace 1881, and of the Republic the 105th. The girl who has brought in coal for my fire is twenty years old. She was born in New York, and can neither read nor write. To me, when I heard it, this seemed sin and shame, and I got her a spelling-book. She is trying what she can, but it is uphill work. She has really no time. Last night when I came in, at eleven, she was not through scrubbing the halls. She gets four dollars a month. Her shoes cost two dollars a pair. She says she can sew; but I guess it is about as I can. In the natural course of things, this girl will be a mother of citizens of the Republic.

Underneath are girls who can sew ; they run sewing- machines with their feet all day. I have seen girls in Asia carrying water-jugs on their heads and young women in South America bearing burdens. They were lithe and strong and symmetrical ; but to turn a young woman into motive power for a sewing-machine is to weaken and injure her physically. And these girls are to rear, or ought to reai*, citizens of the Republic.

But there is worse and worse than this. Go out into the streets at night, and you will find them filled with girls who will never be mothers. To the man who has known the love of mother, of sister, of sweetheart, wife, and daughter, this is the saddest sight of all.

The ladies of the Brooklyn churches they are getting up petitions for the suppression of Mormon polygamy ; they would have it rooted out with pains and penalties, trampled out, if need be, with fire and sword ; and their reverend Congressman-elect is going, when he takes his seat, to introduce a most stringent bill to that end ; for that a man should have more wives than one is a burning

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