Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution.  It is vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that instinct into evil.  The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes, especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people.  The position of the women of this class is not very high.  Men do not treat her as an equal.  They woo her for a wife.  In the same manner the boy does not play with the girl.  The relations between young people very readily degenerate.  The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward course.

Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her.  Although not remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a stenographer.  She was not destined to realize her ambition.  As soon as she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her working papers.  The family needed additional income, not to meet actual living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order that the only son of the family might go to college.  Max was seventeen, a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should toil unceasingly for his advancement.

Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin underwear factory.  At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a skilled operator on a tucking machine.  She sat down to her work every morning at eight o’clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a minute.  The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the continuity of a tuck.  When you are on piece wages you do not relish stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.

So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of strong tea, made her noon meal.  After lunch she again sat down to her machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.

At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the community four miles of tucked muslin.  In return, the community had rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven dollars every week in the year.