I had come here with the usual idea that coming was the only problem—­that everybody had work; that there were no poor people in this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed.  I was disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night and day.  I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the “Help Wanted” columns of the papers.  It was while looking for work that I first became acquainted with the Bowery.  It was in the current of the unemployed that I was swept there first.  It was there that I first discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless, and many of them homeless.

An advertisement in the morning paper calling for a “bed-hand”—­whatever that might mean—­led me to a big lodging-house on the Bowery.  They wanted a man to wash the floors and make the beds up, and the pay was one dollar a day.  I got in line with the applicants.  I was about the forty-fifth man.  Many a time I have wished that I could understand what was passing in the clerk’s mind when he dismissed me with a wave of the hand.  I thought, perhaps, that my dismissal meant that he had engaged a man, but that was not the case.  A man two or three files behind me got the job.

My next attempt led me to a public school on Greenwich Avenue.  The janitor wanted an assistant.  I was so weary with my inactivity, that any kind of a job at any kind of pay would have been acceptable.  The janitor showed me over the school, told me what his work was.  Finally, he took me to the cellar where he had piled up in a corner about twenty lots of ashes.  That, of course, was the first thing to be done, and though the pile looked rather discouraging, I stripped to the work, and went at it.  My task was to get the ashes outside ready for carting away.  I was about six hours on the job, when I accidently overheard the janitor say to his wife:  “Shut your mouth, I have just got a sucker of a greenhorn to get them out.”  That was enough.  I got my coat and hat, went over to the janitor’s door, but before I could open my mouth, his wife said:  “What’s up?”

“Oh, the job’s all right,” I replied, “but what I object to is the way you do your whispering!”

The lowest in the scale of all human employments is the art of canvassing for a sewing machine company.  I did it for two weeks.  My teacher taught me how to canvass a tenement.  The janitor is the traditional arch enemy of the canvasser.  My teaching consisted largely in how to avoid him, circumvent him, or exploit him.  A Mrs. Smith—­a mythical Mrs. Smith—­always lived on the top floor.  I was taught to interview her first; then I canvassed from the top down.