Human Selfishness

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 29, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 22.

Human Selfishness.

As illustrating the selfishness of so-called Christian shop-keepers in the "most Christian City" in the world, a writer in the World's Work presents some information from his investigations of conditions of shop-girls; that is, of manufacturing houses who employ much help, and where the assistants live on premises furnished by employers. Sometimes there is one bath for a hundred people, sometimes no bath is provided at all. The lavatories are used by men and women alike, and they sleep four to fourteen in a room, sometimes two in a bed, with blocked fireplaces and closed windows. England allows six hundred cubic feet of air space for each criminal, but these shop assistants are compelled to live in a space of less than three hundred cubic feet. In many cases they are lodged in old, tumble-down private house properties, the sanitary conditions of which are unspeakably bad. That they do exist, shows the essential selfishness of the natural heart of man unless restrained or controlled by civil law.