Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ Lucia accepted her ejection with a silent glare of deep Italian hate. "That girl will murder some one before she's much older," Miss Norris predicted. "Murder some one!"
THE great discouragement in our work comes from the flabbiness of character that so often results from poverty—from decent, debilitating, ill-nourished poverty. And the fact that Lucia could look murderous confirmed my interest in her. ”

“ WHEN a family has to pay eighteen dollars a month rent for three pestilential rooms, corset covers infected with tuberculosis will be "finished" there for eight cents a gross. We, as a community, take advantage of the necessities of the Ancilottis in order to make them work like starving slaves for a wage that will not keep them healthy, and in dark rooms that we would not use for cattle. ”

“ When they all worked they could finish from eight to ten gross in a day—from 1,100 to 1,400 corset covers—and earn from fifty cents to a dollar. Lucia hoped to earn three dollars a week in the factory. She was, naturally, eager to be at it.
She said good night at her door in a cheerful friendliness, and hurried upstairs to make a few pennies before going to bed. I thought of her at work as I walked back to the Settlement House. I wondered whether anything in Miss Norris's girlhood had ever meant as much to her as the dance at the club meant to Lucia. ”

“ We have little tots of five or six years tying knots in willow plumes, which is a work that cannot be done by adult hands as well as by these delicate small fingers. We have them picking out basting threads, snipping seams, and giving a sort of kindergarten aid in all kinds of unprotected industry. It ruins their eyes and destroys their health. ”

“ She gave up the struggle when she learned, as we all do, that it was not immorality that she had to fight against, not weakness of will or any lack of virtuous effort, but physical conditions of life that make morality scarcely possible, that weaken all but the strongest wills, and do not yield to any virtuous effort. ”

“ IN THE case of the Ancilottis we were struggling with problems which only the united effort of the whole community can solve: a housing problem of getting these unfortunates cheap and sanitary homes; an employment problem of protecting them from exploitation by employers after we have saved them from the greed of landlords; an educational problem of teaching them in school some industrial skill with which to earn a living—problems which have been solved in other countries as easily as they could be solved in America ”

“ It makes the school children backward in their studies, because they come home to labor instead of to play, and spend their evenings earning instead of studying in their books. Every law that is passed to protect workers in factories sends more workers back to these unprotected homes ”

“ Others offered her $2.50 a week, which she would not take because she could earn as much as that at home. A retail notion store in the Ghetto offered her a dollar a week to work from 8.30 in the morning to 10.30 at night; and this seemed to be the prevailing wage in such shops Lucia, disgusted, returned to home work, where there is no age limit, no provision against night work, and no law to require adequate light and air or sanitary conditions. That is why home work thrives. ”

“ She was a little spinster, perhaps fifty years of age, very pleasantly gray-haired and benevolent. She had retired from school-teaching because she had fallen heir to sufficient property to sustain her without salary. "One can do so little good as a school-teacher," she would say. ”

“ WHEN I was living in the Settlement House in B—— Street, before I came to this one, an Italian girl named Lucia Ancilotti was one of our "Sweet Sixteens," as they called themselves, although she was not more than fourteen at most. ”