The evening times., 1899-10-05
4 Case of brutality.

There was an interesting case of busi-
ness methods carried TO an extreme the
other day in New York \ poor family
were buying furniture on the installment
plan. They became delinquent in their
payments. The agent of the vendor
called TO get the furniture and the wife of
the householder resisted his efforts to re-
cover his property, whereupon he kicked
her severely and she subsequently died.
The result OF all this has been considera-
bic trouble for the agent and an unwel-
come advertisement for the instalment
house
There have been some newspaper COM
ments on this case. for it is one which
suggests number of trains of thought 1t
causes one to wonder whether money is.
after all, the important thing which we
have been led to suppose it is, and whether
il is worth while TO sacrifice lives TO it, as
We do every day. though not in quite so
spectacular fashion. It also leads the
reflective observer 10 consider the whole
business Of buying things on installments
and the influence which it has on social
life. And these reflections, and others like
them, may be continued ad infinitum.
But this incident is hardly sufficiently
typical to be of much use as an illustra-
ton TO anything. One cannot argue from
it that the installment system is bad, be-
cause there are few men in any line of the
collecting business so brutal as to kick a
woman who is in feeble health. or one who
is not for the matter of that. The man
who did this thing would probably have
made himself conspicuous by some such
performance, whatever business he might
have been engaged in, and the people
who employed him could not, as a pure
matter of self preservation, have sane
TONED his methods. They may have adjured
him to get the money somehow or take
the furniture, but there are so many people
who are lying in wait to cheat such deal
ers that certain amount of sternness
and uncompromising severity is necessary
# they are to continue to exist
There are old-fashioned people who will
say that the buying of furniture in this
way is bad, and that couples should begin
life as they used to do, with whatever fur
niture could be secured for cash.
But the scale of wages was diff
ferent in the old times, and furni-
ture was made differently, and not so
much of it was necessary for comfort
Our grandfathers bought a set of kitchen
chairs and bequeathed them, after forty or
fifty years, to their descendants. The
chairs which We buy nowadays will be re-
markably good chairs if they last out our
time. In fact with the grade of furniture
which poor folk use it is coming to be a
fact that it does not pay to move the
chairs and bedsteads very far, to say moth
ing of keeping them through forty years of
married life. The consequence is that
there are continual expenses which our
forefathers did not have. And all this is
things-a matter which cannot be affected
TO any great extent by the workingman's
action. Again, the scale of wages runs
higher in some trades and lower in others
than it used to do, and the workingman is
not able TO save money in many ways. as
his father did The whole Industrial
world IL going through a more or less
jerky and uneven process OF adaptation.
and the lnstaliinent system is a symptom
of it. Sometimes IL works very we'll in
deed, and occasionally 1t panders to greed
on the one hand and improvidence on the
other. IL looks as IL the only thing which