Twenty years at Hull-house, with autobiographical notes . bout the old grievanceswhich he had repeated so often that he could talk 220 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE of nothing else. It was easy to recognize the samenervous symptoms which the broken-down lecturerexhibits who has depended upon the exploitationof his own experiences to keep himself of his stories was indeed pathetic. His em-ployer, during thebusy season, had methim one Sundayafternoon in LincolnPark whither he hadtaken his threeyoungest children,one of whom had- been ill. The em-ployer scolded himfor thus wasting histime a
Twenty years at Hull-house, with autobiographical notes . bout the old grievanceswhich he had repeated so often that he could talk 220 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE of nothing else. It was easy to recognize the samenervous symptoms which the broken-down lecturerexhibits who has depended upon the exploitationof his own experiences to keep himself of his stories was indeed pathetic. His em-ployer, during thebusy season, had methim one Sundayafternoon in LincolnPark whither he hadtaken his threeyoungest children,one of whom had- been ill. The em-ployer scolded himfor thus wasting histime and roughlyasked why he hadnot taken homeenough work to keephimself busy throughthe day. The storywas quite crediblebecause the residents at Hull-House have hadmany opportunities to see the worker driven ruth-lessly during the season and left in idleness for longweeks afterward. We have slowly come to realizethat periodical idleness as well as the payment ofwages insufficient for maintenance of the manualworker in full industrial and domestic efficiency,. LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 221 stand economically on the same footing with thesweated industries, the overwork of women, andemployment of children. But of all the aspects of social misery nothing isso heart-breaking as unemployment, and it wasinevitable that we should see much of it in a neigh-borhood where low rents attracted the poorly paidworker and many newly arrived immigrants whowere first employed in gangs upon railroad exten-sions and similar undertakings. The sturdy peas-ants eager for work were either the victims of thepadrone who fleeced them unmercifully, both insecuring a place to work and then in supplying themwith food, or they became the mere sport of unscru-pulous employment agencies. Hull-House madean investigation both of the padrone and of theagencies in our immediate vicinity, and the out-come confirming what we already suspected, weeagerly threw ourselves into a movement to pro-cure free employment bure
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