102 ADVENTURES IN IDEALISM 



A tool factory was opened, a basket factory which 

 lasted only a few years a knitting mill and a hat fac- 

 tory. Some of these concerns are working there to- 

 day; some have changed hands and removed. 



Several dozen five-room houses were built around 

 them and the ensemble made up the industrial center 

 of Woodbine. The Baron de Hirsch Fund built the 

 houses, gave them to the tenants on a first mortgage, 

 and by paying eight dollars a month each man be- 

 came, in eight or ten years, the owner of his little 

 dwelling. Remembering that these people had come 

 from either the pale of settlement in Russia, where 

 they had existed in utter poverty; or from the slums 

 of New York or Philadelphia, where a whole grown 

 family would be crowded into two or three rooms, it 

 may be imagined that this bright, cheerful, sunny, 

 little house, set on a large plot of ground, appeared 

 to them a veritable paradise. 



My husband's interest in the workingmen's cause 

 brought him into difficulties. The manufacturers 

 said that, owing to his "interference," the working- 

 men were leaving them. In answer to this charge, 

 he wrote: 



"You know, my dear Mr. Reichow, as well as I 

 do, that it is the higher wages that workingmen earn 

 in other places; that, and only that causes the migra- 

 tion of the employee not Sabsovich." 



The economic depression of 1893 affected the cloak 

 industry unfavorably and the decreased demand led 



