MOODY : IHE CONDITION OF PACKINC; HOUSE EMPLOYEES. 53 



sharing \Yith its employees. Wages in this packing house are 

 somewhat lower than in Fowler's. Armour's was the first packing 

 house to employ a professional chemist. 



Mr. Armour has done very little, practically nothing, to better 

 the condition of his employees in their home life, and in this he is 

 somewhat behind Mr. Fov/ler. It is the testimony of men who 

 have been in the packing house for years that it is a desperately 

 hard place to reform, and men who have been Christian men for 

 years are still the butt of jokes and sneers from their fellow work- 

 men. 



I shall now ask you to visit with me some of the houses in the 

 west bottoms. No. i. In a little house we found an old colored 

 woman and her brother. For three rooms she pays ^6 per month 

 and washes in part payment. She is a widow, is religious but not 

 moral. The brother is a roustabout in the packing house. The 

 house is very dirty, very crowded with furniture, such as it was, 

 and had a rare odor. I was accompanied in these visits by one of 

 the slum workers of the Salvation Army, to whose kind offices I 

 owe much, for without her I would doubtless have been simimarily 

 ejected from some of the houses visited. 



No. 2. Boone's. A four room house at $7 per month. A white 

 man with a colored wife, a colored step-son and a little baby. The 

 husband is a consumptive and imable to do any work. Harris, the 

 step-son, is a cook earning $5 per week, but now out of work. 

 They were paying $2.50 interest per month on $30 worth of furni- 

 ture. The wife keeps one or two boarders. The front, or living 

 room, is heated by a tiny stove that holds one and one-half small 

 shovelfuls of coal. This house is owned by Mrs. Hickey. The 

 husband yielded to the entreaties of a Salvation Army lassie and 

 accepted Jesus Christ. The family as a whole, I believe, while 

 poor are fairly moral. 



No. 3. In a two room house we found Mrs. Hickey, an Irish 

 widow. This place takes first rank for filth. Mrs. Hickey is a 

 peculiar character. Some eight or ten years ago she owned a 

 large number of cottages but these have been destroyed by fire. 

 Borrowing 'money she has built several little shanties on leased 

 land which she rents. From the Boone's mentioned above she 

 has had no rent since December, 1893, but her heart is too kind to 

 turn them out. Her ground lease costs her $37 per month. She 

 borrowed $1000 at 10 per cent, and was damnably tricked into 

 borrowing another thousand at 60 per cent. She has paid out $13 

 for a hydrant, $25 for a water meter and her monthly water rent, 

 and supplies city water to her renters free of charge. She 



