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Prisoners of Poverty Abroad

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Title: Prisoners of Poverty Abroad

Author: Helen Campbell


        
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Language: English

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Produced by Bryan Ness, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)






PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD.


BY HELEN CAMPBELL,

AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "THE WHAT-TO-DO-CLUB,"
"MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," "MISS MELINDA'S OPPORTUNITY,"
"ROGER BERKELEY'S PROBATION."


BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1889.


_Copyright, 1889,_

BY HELEN CAMPBELL.


University Press:

JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.


     _"But laying hands on another_
       _To coin his labor and sweat,_
     _He goes in pawn to his victim_
       _For eternal years in debt."_


TO

F. W. P.

THE FRIEND IN WHOM JUSTICE AND TRUTH ARE SO DEEPLY
IMPLANTED THAT BOTH ARE INSTINCTS,

AND WHOSE MANHOOD HOLDS THE PROMISE OF WORK THAT WILL
GO FAR TOWARD FULFILLING THE DEEPEST WISH OF THE
GENERATION TO WHICH THE MAKER OF THESE PAGES BELONGS.




PREFACE.


The studies which follow, the result of fifteen months' observation
abroad, deal directly with the workers in all trades open to women,
though, from causes explained in the opening chapter, less from the side
of actual figures than the preceding volume, the material for which was
gathered in New York. But as months have gone on, it has become plain
that many minds are also at work, the majority on the statistical side
of the question, and that the ethical one is that which demands no less
attention. Both are essential to understanding and to effort in any
practical direction, and this is recognized more and more as
organization brings together for consultation the women who, having
long felt deeply, are now learning to think and act effectually. These
pages are for them, and mean simply another side-light on the labor
question,--the question in which all other modern problems are tangled,
and whose solving waits only the larger light whose first gleams are
already plain to see.

HELEN CAMPBELL.

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY,

_October, 1888._




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER                                                          PAGE

    I. BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA                                        7

   II. IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE                                         19

  III. THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL                              31

   IV. AMONG THE SWEATERS                                          42

    V. CHILD OF THE EAST END                                       54

   VI. AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS                                       66

  VII. NELLY, A WEST END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE                     77

 VIII. LONDON SHIRT MAKERS                                         90

   IX. THE TALE OF A BARROW                                       100

    X. STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN                                  112

   XI. LONDON SHOP-GIRLS                                          122

  XII. FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE EEL-SOUP MAN IN THE BOROUGH      131

 XIII. WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES                                    155

  XIV. FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS                                 167

   XV. FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS                                    176

  XVI. THE CITY OF THE SUN                                        184

 XVII. DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS                         194

XVIII. A SILK WEAVER OF PARIS                                     203

  XIX. IN THE RUE JEANNE D'ARC                                    214

   XX. FROM FRANCE TO ITALY                                       224

  XXI. PRESENT AND FUTURE                                         234




PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD.




CHAPTER I.

BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA.


With the ending of the set of studies among the working-women of New
York, begun in the early autumn of 1886 and continued through several
months of 1887, came the desire to know something of comparative
conditions abroad, and thus be better able to answer questions
constantly put, as to the actual status of women as workers, and of
their probable future in these directions. There were many additional
reasons for continuing a search, in itself a heart-sickening and utterly
repellant task. One by one, the trades open to women, over ninety in
number, had given in their returns, some of the higher order meaning
good wages, steady work and some chance of bettering conditions. But
with the great mass of workers, the wages had, from many causes, fallen
below the point of subsistence, or kept so near it that advance was
impossible, and the worker, even when fairly well trained, faced a
practically hopeless future.

The search began with a bias against rather than for the worker, and the
determination to do strictest justice to employer as well as employed.
Long experience had taught what was to be expected from untrained,
unskilled laborers, with no ambition or power to rise. Approaching the
subject with the conviction that most of the evil admitted to exist must
be the result of the worker's own defective training and inability to
make the best and most of the wages received, it very soon became plain
that, while this remained true, deeper causes were at work, and that
unseen forces must be weighed and measured before just judgment could be
possible. No denunciation of grasping employers answered the question
why they grasped, and why men who in private relations showed warm
hearts and the tenderest care for those nearest them became on the
instant, when faced by this problem of labor, deaf and blind to the
sorrow and struggle before them.

That the system was full of evils was freely admitted whenever facts
were brought home and attention compelled. But the easy-going American
temperament is certain that the wrong of to-day will easily become
righted by to-morrow, and is profoundly sceptical as to the existence of
any evil of which this is not true.

"It's pretty bad, yes, I know it's pretty bad," said one large employer
of women, and his word was the word of many others. "But we're not to
blame. I don't want to grind 'em down. It's the system that's wrong, and
we are its victims. Competition gets worse and worse. Machinery is too
much for humanity. I've been certain of that for a good while, and so,
of course, these hands have to take the consequences."

Nothing better indicates the present status of the worker than this very
phrase "hands." Not heads with brains that can think and plan, nor souls
born to grow into fulness of life, but hands only; hands that can hold
needle or grasp tool, or follow the order of the brain to which they are
bond-servants, each pulse moving to the throb of the great engine which
drives all together, but never guided by any will of brain or joy of
soul in the task of the day. There has been a time in the story of
mankind when hand and brain worked together. In every monument of the
past on this English soil, even at the topmost point of springing arch
or lofty pillar, is tracery and carving as careful and cunning as if all
eyes were to see and judge it as the central point and test of the labor
done. Has the nineteenth century, with its progress and its boast, no
possibility of such work from any hand of man, and if not, where has the
spirit that made it vanished, and what hope may men share of its return?
Not one, if the day's work must mean labor in its most exhausting form;
for many women, fourteen to sixteen hours at the sewing machine, the
nerve-force supplied by rank tea, and the bit of bread eaten with it,
the exhausted bodies falling at last on whatever may do duty for bed,
with no hope that the rising sun will bring release from trial or any
gleam of a better day.

With each week of the long search the outlook became more hopeless. Here
was this army crowding into the great city, packed away in noisome
tenement houses, ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre,
and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. If this
was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air,
free movement and natural growth. What barbarism at its worst could hold
such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its victims to more
lingering deaths? Admitting the almost impossibility of making them
over, incased as they are in ignorance and prejudice, this is simply
another count against the social order which has accepted such results
as part of its story, and now looks on, speculating, wondering what had
better be done about it.

The philanthropist has endeavored to answer the question, and sought out
many devices for alleviation, struggling out at last to the conviction
that prevention must be attempted, and pausing bewildered before the
questions involved in prevention. For them there has been active and
unceasing work, their brooms laboring as vainly as Mrs. Partington's
against the rising tide of woe and want and fruitless toil, each wave
only the forerunner of mightier and more destructive ones, while the
world has gone its way, casting abundant contributions toward the
workers, but denying that there was need for agitation or speculation as
to where or how the next crest might break. There were men and women who
sounded an alarm, and were in most cases either hooted for their pains,
or set down as sentimentalists, newspaper philanthropists, fanatics,
socialists,--any or all of the various titles bestowed freely by those
who regard interference with any existing order of things as rank
blasphemy.

Money has always been offered freely, but money always carries small
power with it, save for temporary alleviation. The word of the poet who
has sounded the depths of certain modern tendencies holds the truth for
this also:--


     "Not that which we give, but what we share,
     For the gift without the giver is bare;
     Who bestows himself, with his alms feeds three,
     Himself, his hungering neighbor and me."


Yet it is the Anglo-Saxon conviction, owned by English and American in
common, and unshaken though one should rise from the dead to arraign it,
that what money would not do, cannot be done, and when money is rejected
and the appeal made for personal consideration of the questions
involved, there is impatient and instantaneous rejection of the
responsibility. Evolution is supposed to have the matter in charge, and
to deal with men in the manner best suited to their needs. If the
ancient creed is still held and the worshipper repeats on Sunday: "I
believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," he
supplements it on Monday and all other days, till Sunday comes again,
with the new version, the creed of to-day, formulated by a man who
fights it from hour to hour:


     "I believe in Father Mud, the Almighty Plastic;
     And in Father Dollar, the Almighty Drastic."


It is because these men and women must be made to understand; because
they must be reached and made to see and know what life may be counted
worth living, and how far they are responsible for failure to make
better ideals the ideal of every soul nearest them, that the story of
the worker must be told over and over again till it has struck home. To
seek out all phases of wretchedness and want, and bring them face to
face with those who deny that such want is anything but a temporary,
passing state, due to a little over-production and soon to end, is not a
cheerful task, and it is made less so by those who, having never looked
for themselves, pronounce all such statements either sensational or the
work of a morbid and excited imagination. The majority decline to take
time to see for themselves. The few who have done so need no further
argument, and are ready to admit that no words can exaggerate, or,
indeed, ever really tell in full the real wretchedness that is plain for
all who will look. But, even with them, the conviction remains that it
is, after all, a temporary state of things, and that all must very
shortly come right.

Day by day, the desire has grown stronger to make plain the fact that
this is a world-wide question, and one that must be answered. It is not
for a city here and there, chiefly those where emigrants pour in, and
so often, the mass of unskilled labor, always underpaid, and always near
starvation. It is for the cities everywhere in the world of
civilization, and because London includes the greatest numbers, these
lines are written in London after many months of observation among
workers on this side of the sea, and as the prelude to some record of
what has been seen and heard, and must still be before the record ends,
not only here, but in one or two representative cities on the continent.
London, however, deserves and demands chief consideration, not only
because it leads in numbers, but because our own conditions are, in many
points, an inheritance which crossed the sea with the pilgrims, and is
in every drop of Anglo-Saxon blood. If the glint of the sovereign and
its clink in the pocket are the dearest sight and sound to British eyes
and ears, America has equal affection for her dollars, in both countries
alike chink and glint standing with most, for the best things life
holds. It remains for us to see whether counteracting influences are
stronger here than with us, and if the worker's chance is hampered more
or less by the conditions that hedge in all labor. The merely
statistical side of the question is left, as in the previous year's
work, chiefly to those who deal only with this phase, though drawn upon
wherever available or necessary. There is, however, small supply. Save
in scattered trades-union reports, an occasional blue book, and here and
there the work of a private investigator, like Mr. Charles Booth, there
is nothing which has the value of our own reports from the various
bureaus of labor. The subject has until now excited little interest or
attention, save with a few political economists, and the band of
agitators who are the disciples, not of things as they are, but things
as they ought to be. One of the most admirable and well-officered
organizations in New York, "The Workingwoman's Protective Union," which
gave invaluable assistance last year, has only a small and feeble
imitation in London, in the Woman's Protective Union, founded by Mrs.
Peterson, and now under the admirable management of Miss Black, but
still struggling for place and recognition.

Thus it will be seen that the work to be done here is necessarily more
sketchy in character, though none the less taken from life in every
detail, the aim in both cases being the same,--to give, as far as
possible, the heart of the problem as it is seen by the worker, as well
as by the eyes that may have larger interpretation for outward phases.
The homes and daily lives of the workers are the best answers as to the
comfort-producing power of wages, and in those homes we are to find what
the wage can do, and what it fails to do, not alone for the East End,
but for swarming lanes and courts in all this crowded London. The East
End has by no means the monopoly, though novelists and writers of
various orders have chosen it as the type of all wretchedness. But
London wretchedness is very impartially distributed. Under the shadow of
the beautiful abbey, and the towers of archiepiscopal Lambeth Palace;
appearing suddenly in the midst of the great warehouses, and the press
of traffic in the city itself, and thronging the streets of that borough
road, over which the Canterbury pilgrims rode out on that immortal
summer morning,--everywhere is the swarm of haggard, hungry humanity.
No winter of any year London has known since the day when Roman walls
still shut it in, has ever held sharper want or more sorrowful need.
Trafalgar Square has suddenly become a world-wide synonym for the
saddest sights a great city can ever have to show; and in Trafalgar
Square our search shall begin, following one of the unemployed to the
refuge open to her when work failed.




CHAPTER II.

IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE.


To the London mind nothing is more certain than that Trafalgar Square,
which may be regarded as the real focus of the city, is unrivalled in
situation and surroundings. "The finest site in Europe," one hears on
every side, and there is reason for the faith. In spite of the fact that
the National Gallery which it fronts is a singularly defective and
unimpressive piece of architecture, it hardly weakens the impression,
though the traveller facing it recalls inevitably a criticism made many
years ago: "This unhappy structure may be said to have everything it
ought not to have, and nothing which it ought to have. It possesses
windows without glass, a cupola without size, a portico without height,
pepper boxes without pepper, and the finest site in Europe without
anything to show upon it."

In spite of all this, to which the pilgrim must at once agree, the
Square itself, with the Nelson Pillar and the noble lions at its base,
nobler for their very simplicity; its fountains and its outlook on the
beautiful portico of St. Martin's, the busy Strand and the great
buildings rising all about, is all that is claimed for it, and the
traveller welcomes any chance that takes him through it. Treasures of
art are at its back, and within short radius, every possibility of
business or pleasure, embodied in magnificent hotels, theatres,
warehouses, is for the throng that flows unceasingly through these main
arteries of the city's life.

This is one phase of what may be seen in Trafalgar Square. But with
early autumn and the shortening days and the steadily increasing
pressure of that undercurrent of want and misery through which strange
flotsam and jetsam come to the surface, one saw, on the long benches or
crouched on the asphalt pavement, lines of men and women sitting
silently, making no appeal to passers-by, but, as night fell, crouching
lower in their thin garments or wrapping old placards or any sack or
semblance of covering about them, losing memory in fitful sleep and
waking with dawn to a hopeless day. This was the sight that Trafalgar
Square had for those who passed through it, and who at last began to
question, "Why is it? Who are they? They don't seem to beg. What does it
mean?"

The Square presently overflowed, and in any and every sheltered spot the
same silent lines lay down at night along the Thames Embankment, in any
covered court or passage, men rushing with early dawn to fight for
places at the dock gates, breaking arms or dislocating shoulders often
in the struggle, and turning away with pale faces, as they saw the
hoped-for chance given to a neighbor, to carry their tale to the hungry
women whose office was to wait. The beggars pursued their usual course,
but it was quite plain that these men and women had no affinity with
them save in rags. Day by day the numbers swelled. "Who are they? What
does it mean?" still sounded, and at last the right phrase was found,
and the answer came: "They are the 'unemployed.' There is no longer any
work to be had, and these people can neither get away nor find any
means of living here."

For a time London would not believe its ears. There must be work, and so
food for whoever was willing to work; but presently this cry silenced,
and it became plain that somebody must do something.

Food was the first thought; and from the Limehouse district, and a
refuge known as the Outcasts' Home, a great van loaded with loaves of
bread came in two or three times a week, taking back to the refuge in
the empty cart such few as could be induced to try its mercies. Coffee
was also provided on a few occasions; and as the news spread by means of
that mysterious telegraphy current in the begging fraternity, suddenly
the Square overflowed with their kind; and who wanted to work and could
not, and who wanted no work on any consideration, no man could
determine.

With the story of this tangle, of the bewilderment and dismay for all
alike, and the increasing despair of the unemployed, this chronicle has
but indirectly to do. Trafalgar Square was emptied at last by means
already familiar to all. Beggars skulked back to their hiding-places
like wharf-rats to the rotten piles that shelter them; the unemployed
dispersed also, showing themselves once more in the files that
registered when the census of the unemployed was decided upon; and then,
for the most part, were lost to public sight in the mass of general,
every-day, to-be-expected wretchedness which makes up London below the
surface.

Scores of wretched figures crouched on the icy asphalt of the Square on
a pouring night early in November, before its clearing had been ordered.
The great van was expected, but had not appeared, and men huddled in the
most sheltered corners of this most unsheltered spot, cowering under any
rag of covering they had been able to secure. In a corner by the lions a
pair had taken refuge,--a boy of ten or so, wrapped in two newspaper
placards, and his bare feet tucked into a horse's nose-bag, too old and
rotten for any further service in its own line of duty; over him
crouched a girl, whose bent figure might have belonged to eighty, but
whose face as she looked up showed youth which even her misery could not
wipe out. She had no beauty, save soft dark eyes and a delicate face,
both filled with terror as she put one arm over the boy, who sprung to
his feet. "I'll not go where Nell can't," he said, the heavy sleep still
in his eyes; "we're goin' to keep together, me an' Nell is."

"'Tain't the van," the girl said, still holding him; "they tried to take
him back to the Refuge the other night, and he's afraid of 'em. They
don't take any over sixteen, and so I can't go, an' he's afraid somehow
they'll take him in spite of me. I'd be willin' enough, for there's no
more I can do for him, and he's too little for this sort of life; but he
won't go."

The girl's thin clothing was soaked with rain; she shivered as she
spoke, but sat there with the strange patience in look and manner that
marks the better class of English poor. "But is there nobody to give you
a shelter on such a night? You must have somebody. What does it mean?"

"I had a bit of a place till last Wednesday, but the rent was far behind
and they turned me out. I was home then a day or two, but it's worse
there than the streets. There was no work, and father drunk, and beating
mother and all of us, and Billy worst of all; so the streets were
better. I've tried for work, but there's none to be had, and now I'm
waiting. Perhaps I shall die pretty soon, and then they can take Billy
into the Refuge. I'm waiting for that."

"But there must be work for any one as young and strong as you."

The girl shook her head. "I've walked the soles off me shoes to find it.
There's no work in all London. I can go on the streets, but I'd rather
do this. My mother did her best for us all, but she's been knocked round
till she's as near death as we. There's no work for man nor woman in all
London."

The boy had settled down at her feet again, satisfied that no attempt
was to be made to separate them, and fell asleep instantly, one hand
holding her dress. To leave the pair was impossible. Other cases might
be as desperate, but this was nearest; and presently a bargain had been
made with an old woman who sells roasted chestnuts in St. Martin's Lane,
close by, and the two were led away to her shelter in some rookery in
the Seven Dials. A day or two later the full story was told, and has
its place as the first and strongest illustration of the state of things
in this great city of London, where, as the year 1888 opens, official
registers hold the names of over seventeen thousand men who wish to work
at any rate that may be paid, but for whom there is no work, their names
representing a total of over fifty thousand who are slowly starving; and
this mass known to be but a part of that which is still unregistered,
and likely to remain so, unless private enterprise seeks it out in lane
and alley where it hides.

The father was a "coal whipper" on the docks near Tower Hill, this
meaning that he spent his days in the hold of a collier or on the deck,
guiding the coal basket which ascends from the hold through a "way" made
of broken oars lashed together, and by means of a wheel and rope is sent
on and emptied. Whether in hold or on deck it is one of the most
exhausting forms of labor, and the men, whose throats are lined with
coal dust, wash them out with floods of beer. Naturally they are all
intemperate, and the wages taken home are small in proportion to their
thirst. And as an evening solace, the father, who had once been footman
in a good family, and married the lady's maid (which fact accounted for
the unusual quality of Nelly's English), beat them all around, weeping
maudlin tears over them in the morning, and returning at night to
duplicate the occasion for more.

The mother had made constant fight for respectability. She did such
dressmaking as the neighborhood offered, but they moved constantly as
fortunes grew lower and lower, sheltering at last in two rooms in a
rookery in Tower Hamlets.

Here came the final disablement. The father, a little drunker than
usual, pushed the wife downstairs and their Billy after her, the result
being a broken hip for the first and a broken arm for the last. Nelly,
who had begun to stitch sacks not long before, filled her place as she
could, and cared for the other seven, all not much more than babies, and
most of them in time mercifully removed by death. She was but twelve
when her responsibility began, and it did not end when the mother came
home, to be chiefly bedridden for such days as remained. The three
little boys were all "mud-larks," that is, prowled along the river
shore, picking up any odds and ends that could be sold to the rag-shop
or for firewood, and their backs were scored with the strap which the
father carried in his pocket and took out for his evening's occupation
when he came.

The mother, sitting up in bed and knitting or crocheting for a small
shop near by, fared no better than the rest, for Billy, who tried to
stand between them, only infuriated the brute the more. The crisis came
when he one night stole the strap from his father's pocket and cut it
into pieces. Nelly, who was now earning fair wages, had long thought
that her mother's life would be easier without them; and now, as Billy
announced that he had done for himself and must run, she decided to run
too.

"I told mother I'd have a bit of a room not far off," she said, "only
where father wouldn't be likely to search us out, and I'd do for Billy
and for her too what I could. She cried, but she saw it was best. Billy
was just a bag of bones and all over strap marks. He'd have to mud-lark
just the same, but he'd have more to eat and no beatings, and he'd
always hung to me from the time he was born. So that is the way I did,
and, bit by bit, I got a comfortable place, and had Billy in school, and
kept us both, and did well. But then the wages began to go down, and
every week they got lower till, where I'd earned twelve shillings a week
sometimes, I was down to half and less than half that. I tried stitching
for the sweaters a while, but I'd no machine, and they had more hands
than they wanted everywhere, and I went back to the sacks. And at last
they dismissed a lot too, and I went here and there and everywhere for
another chance, and not one,--not one anywhere. I pawned everything, bit
by bit, till we'd nothing left but some rags and straw to sleep upon,
and the rent far behind; and then I went home when we were turned out,
and that father took for his chance, and was worse than ever.

"And so, when there was no work anywhere, though I was ready for
anything, I didn't care what, and I saw we were just taking the bread
from mother's mouth (though it's little enough she wanted), then I told
Billy to stay with her, and I went out and to the Square and sat down
with the rest, and wondered if I ought to sit there and wait to be dead,
or if I hadn't the right to do it quicker and just try the river. But I
saw all those I was with just as bad off and worse, and some with
babies, and so I didn't know what to do, but just to wait there. What
can we do? They say the Queen is going to order work so that the men can
get wages; but they don't say if she is going to do anything for the
women. She's a woman; but then I suppose a Queen couldn't any way know,
except by hearsay, that women really starve; and women do for men first
anyhow. But I will work any way at anything, if only you'll find it for
me to do--if only you will."

For one of the fifty-three thousand work and place have been found. For
the rest is still the cry: "I will work any way at anything, if only
you'll find it for me to do; if only you will."




CHAPTER III.

THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL.


"History repeats itself," is a very hackneyed phrase, yet, for want of
any better or more expressive one, must lead such words as are to be
said on an old yet ever new evil; for it is just forty years ago, since
the winter of 1847-1848 showed among the working men and women of
England conditions analogous to those of the present, though on a far
smaller scale. Acute distress prevailed then as now. Revolution was in
the air, and what it might mean being far less plain to apprehensive
minds than it is to-day, a London newspaper, desirous of knowing just
what dangers were to be faced, sent a commissioner to investigate the
actual conditions of the working classes, and published his reports from
day to day. Then, for the first time, a new word came into circulation,
and "sweating" became the synonym, which it has since remained, for a
system of labor which means the maximum of profit for the employer and
the minimum of wages for the employed. The term is hardly scientific,
yet it is the only one recognized in the most scientific investigation
thus far made. That of 1847-1848 did its work for the time, nor have its
results wholly passed away. Charles Kingsley, young then and ardent, his
soul stirred with longing to lighten all human suffering, took up the
cause of the worker, and in his pamphlet "Cheap Clothes and Nasty," and
later, in the powerful novel "Alton Locke," showed every phase of the
system, then in its infancy, and, practically, entirely unknown on the
other side of the Atlantic.

The results of this agitation became visible at once. Unions and
Associations of various sorts among tailors and the one or two other
trades to which the sweating system had applied, were organized and from
year to year extended and perfected till it had come to be the popular
conviction that, save in isolated cases here and there, the evil was to
be found only among the foreign population, and even there, hedged in
and shorn of its worst possibilities. This conviction remained and made
part of the estimate of any complaints that now and then arose, and
though the work of the organized charities, and of independent
investigations here and there, demonstrated from year to year that it
had increased steadily, its real scope was still unbelieved. Now, after
forty years, the story tells itself again, this time in ways which
cannot be set down as newspaper sensationalism or anybody's desire to
make political capital. It is a Blue Book which holds the latest
researches and conclusions, and Blue Books are not part of the popular
reading, but are usually tucked away in government offices or libraries,
to which the public has practically no access. A newspaper paragraph
gives its readers the information that another report on this or that
feature of public interest has been prepared and shelved for posterity,
and there the matter ends.

In the present case public feeling and interest have been so stirred by
the condition of unexampled misery and want among masses eager to work
but with no work to be had, that the report has been called for and
read and discussed to a degree unknown to any of its predecessors. While
it gives results only in the most compact form and by no means compares
with work like that of Mr. Charles Peck in his investigations for the
New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor, it still holds a mass of
information invaluable to all who are seeking light on the cause of
present evils. As with us the system is closely a part of the
manufacture of cheap clothing of every order, tailoring leading, and
various other trades being included, furniture makers, strange to say,
being among the chief sufferers in these.

With us the system is so clearly defined and so well known, at any rate
in all our large centres of labor, that definition is hardly necessary.
For England and America alike the sweater is simply a sub-contractor
who, at home or in small workshops, undertakes to do work, which he in
turn sublets to other contractors, or has done under his own eyes. The
business had a simple and natural beginning, the journey-worker of fifty
years ago taking home from his employers work to be done there either
by himself or some member of his family. At this time it held decided
advantages for both sides. The master-tailor was relieved from finding
workshop accommodations with all the accompanying expense and from
constant supervision of his work people, while good work was insured by
the pride of the worker in his craft, as well as his desire not to lose
a good connection. There was but the slightest subdivision of labor,
each worker was able to make the garment from the beginning to the end,
apprentices being employed on the least important parts.

Work of this order has no further place in the clothing trade, whether
tailoring or general outfitting, save for the best order of clothing.
Increase of population cheapened material, the introduction of machinery
and the tremendous growth of the ready-made clothing trade are all
responsible for the change. The minutest system of subdivided labor now
rules here as in all trades. When a coat is in question, it is no longer
the master-tailor, journeyman and apprentices who prepare it, but a
legion of cutters, basters, machinists, pressers, fellers, button-hole,
and general workers, who find the learning of any one alone of the
branches an easy matter, and so rush into the trade, the fiercest and
most incessant competition being the instant result.

In 1881 a census was taken in the East End of London which showed over
fifteen thousand tailors at work, of whom more than nine thousand were
women. The number of the latter at present is estimated to be about
twelve thousand, much increase having been prevented by various causes,
for which there is no room here. As the matter at present stands, every
man and woman employed aims to become as fast as possible a sweater on
his or her own account. For large employers this is not so easy; for the
small ones nothing could be simpler, and here are the methods.

If the trade is an unfamiliar one, there is first the initiation by
employment in a sweater's shop, and a few months, or even weeks, gives
all the necessary facility. Then comes the question of workroom; and
here it is only necessary to take the family room, and hire a sewing
machine, which is for rent at two shillings and sixpence, or sixty
cents, a week. To organize the establishment all that is necessary is a
baster, a machinist, a presser, and two or three women-workers, one for
button-holing, one for felling, and one for general work, carrying home,
etc. The baster may be a skilled woman; the presser is always a man, the
irons weighing from seven to eighteen pounds, and the work being of the
most exhausting description, no man being able to continue it beyond
eight or ten years at the utmost. The sweater-employer often begins by
being his own presser, or his own baster; but as business increases his
personal labor lessens. In the beginning his profits are extremely
small, prices varying so that it is impossible to make any general table
of rates. Even in the same branch of trade hardly any two persons are
employed at the same rate, and the range of ability appears to vary with
the wage paid, subdivision of labor being thus carried to its utmost
limit, and the sections of the divisions already mentioned being again
subdivided beyond further possibility. So tremendous is the competition
for work that the sweaters are played off against each other by the
contractors and sub-contractors, the result upon the workers below
being as disastrous as the general effect of the system as a whole.

As one becomes familiar with the characteristics of the East End,--and
this is only after long and persistent comings and goings in street and
alley,--it is found that there are entire streets in Whitechapel or St.
George's-in-the-East, the points where the tailoring trade seems to
focus, in which almost every house contains one, and sometimes several,
sweating establishments, managed usually by men, but now and then in the
hands of women, though only for the cheapest forms of clothing. Here,
precisely as in our own large cities, a room nine or ten feet square is
heated by a coke fire for the presser's irons, and lighted at night by
flaming gas-jets, six, eight, or even a dozen workers being crowded in
this narrow space. But such crowding is worse here than with us, for
reasons which affect also every form of cheap labor within doors.
London, under its present arrangements, is simply an enormous smoke
factory, and no quarter of its vast expanse is free from the plague of
soot and smoke, forever flying, and leaving a coating of grime on every
article owned or used, no matter how cared for. This is true for
Belgravia as for the East End, and "blacks," as the flakes of soot are
known, are eaten and drunk and breathed by everything that walks in
London streets or breathes London air.

There is, then, not only the foulness engendered by human lungs
breathing in the narrowest and most crowded of quarters, but the added
foulness of dirt of every degree and order, overlaid and penetrated by
this deposit of fine soot; the result a griminess that has no
counterpart on the face of the earth. "Cheap clothes and nasty" did not
end with Kingsley's time, and these garments, well made, and sold at a
rate inconceivably low, are saturated with horrible emanations of every
sort, and to the buyer who stops to think must carry an atmosphere that
ends any satisfaction in the cheapness. Setting aside this phase as an
intangible and, in part, sentimental ground for complaint, the fact that
the cheapness depends also upon the number of hours given by the
worker--whose day is never less than fourteen, and often eighteen,
hours--should be sufficient to ban the whole trade. Even for this
longest day there is no uniformity of price, and with articles
identically the same the rate varies with different sweaters, the
increasing competition accentuating these differences more and more. The
sweater himself is more or less at the mercy of the contractor, who says
to him: "Here are so many coats, at so much a coat. If you won't do them
at the price, there are plenty that will."

Already well aware of this fact, the sweater, if the rate falls at all
below his expectation, has simply to pursue the same course with the
waiting worker in his shop, a slight turn of the screw, half a penny off
here and a farthing there, bringing his own profit back to the rate he
assumes as essential. There is no pressure from below to compel justice.
For any rebellious worker a dozen stand waiting to fill the vacant
place; and thus the wrong perpetuates itself, and the sweater, whose
personal relation with those he employs may be of the friendliest,
becomes tyrant and oppressor, not of his own will, but through sheer
force of circumstances. Thus evils, which laws have not reached,
increase from day to day. Inspectors are practically powerless, and the
shameful system, degrading alike to employer and employed, grows by what
it feeds on, and hangs over the East End, a pall blacker and fouler than
the cloud of smoke and soot, also the result of man's folly, not to be
lifted till human eyes see clearer what makes life worth living, and
human hands are less weary with labor that profiteth not, but that
deadens sense and soul alike.

This is the general view of the system as a whole. For the special there
must still be a further word.




CHAPTER IV.

AMONG THE SWEATERS.


"'Nine tailors to make a man,' they say. Well, now if it takes that
amount, and from some lots I've seen I should say it did, you've got to
multiply by nine again if you count in the women. Bless your 'art!" and
here, in his excitement, the inspector began to drop the _h_'s, which
the Board School had taught him to hold to with painful tenacity. "Bless
your 'art! a woman can't make a coat, and every tailor knows it, and
that's one reason 'e beats 'er down and beats 'er down till 'ow she
keeps the breath of life in the Lord only knows. Take the cheapest coat
going and there's a knack to every seam that a woman don't catch. She's
good for trousers and finishing, and she can't be matched for
button-holes when she gives her mind to it, but a coat's beyond her.
I've wondered a good bit over it. The women don't see it themselves,
but now and again there's one that's up to every dodge but a coat seam,
and she wants more money and couldn't be persuaded, no, not if Moses
himself came to try it, that she isn't worth the same as the men. That's
what I 'ear as I go, and I've been hup and down among 'em three years
and over. Their dodges is beyond belief, not the women's,--poor souls!
they're too ground down to 'ave mind enough left for dodges,--but the
sweaters; Parliament's after 'em. There's enough, but ther's no man
halive that I've seen that knows how to 'old a sweater to 'em. How's one
or two inspectors to get through every sweating place in Whitechapel
alone, let alone hall the East End? It's hup an' down an' hin and hout,
and where you find 'em fair and square in a reg'lar shop, or in rooms
plain to see, you'll find 'em in basements and backyards, and
washhouses, and underground,--anywheres like so many rats, though, I'm
blessed if I don't think the rats has the hadvantage. Now, the law says
no working over hours, and I go along in the evening, about knocking-off
time, and find everything all clear only a look in the sweater's heye
that I know well enough. It means most likely that 'e's got 'is women
locked up in a bedroom where the Parliament won't let me go, and that
when my back's turned 'e'll 'ave 'em out, and grin in his sleeve at me
and Parliament too. Or else 'e's agreed with 'em to come at six in the
morning instead of eight. It's a twelve-hour day 'e's a right to, from
eight to eight, but that way he make it fourteen and more, if I or some
other inspector don't appear along.

"Now, suppose I drop down unexpected,--an' that's the way,--before I've
made three calls, and likely nailed every one in the house for
violation, it's down the street like lightening that the hinspector's
after 'em. Then the women are 'ustled out anywhere, into the yard, or in
a dust bin. Lift up 'most anything and you'd find a woman under it. I've
caught 'em with their thimbles on, hot with sewing, and now they drop
'em into their pockets or anywhere. They'd lose a job if they peeped,
and so there's never much to be done for 'em. But why a woman can't
make a coat is what I study over. Did you ever think it out, ma'am? Is
it their 'ands or their heyes that isn't hup to it?"

This position of the little inspector's problem must wait, though in it
is involved that fatal want of training for either eye or hand which
makes the lowest place the only one that the average needlewoman can
fill. Their endurance equals that of the men, and often, in sudden
presses of work, as for a foreign order, work has begun at seven o'clock
on a morning and continued right on through the night and up to four or
five of the next afternoon. The law demands an hour for dinner and half
an hour for tea, but the first is halved or quartered, and the last
taken between the stitches, but with no more stop than is necessary for
swallowing. The penalties for violation of these acts are heavy and the
inspectors work very thoroughly, various convictions having been
obtained in 1886, the penalties varying from two pounds to ten pounds
and costs. But the sweaters, though standing in terror of such
possibility, have learned every device of evasion, and, as before
stated, the women necessarily abet them for fear of losing work
altogether.

Let us see now what the profit of the average sweater is likely to be,
and then that of the workwoman, skilled and unskilled, taking our
figures in every case from the Blue Book containing Mr. Burnett's report
and confirmed by many workers. A small sweater in Brunswick Street
employed a presser and a machinist, with two women for button-holes and
felling, his business being the production of tunics for postmen. For
each of these he received two shillings, or half a dollar a coat, which
he considered a very good price. He paid his presser 4_s._ 6_d._ ($1.12)
per day; his machinist 5_s._ ($1.25); his button-holer 2_s._ 6_d._
(60c.), from which she must find twist and thread; and the feller 1_s._
3_d._ (30c.), a total of thirteen shillings threepence. For twelve coats
he received twenty-four shillings, his own profit thus being ten
shillings and ninepence ($2.68) for his own labor as baster and for
finding thread, soap, coke, and machine. The hours were from seven in
the morning to ten in the evening, less time not sufficing to finish the
dozen coats, this bringing the rate of wages for the highest paid
worker to 4½_d._, or nine cents an hour. For the small sweater the
profit is slight, but each additional machine sends it up, till four or
five mean a handsome return. If work is slack, he has another method of
lessening expenses, and thus increasing profits, arranging matters so
that all the work is done the three last days of the week, starting on a
Thursday morning, for instance, and pressing the workers on for
thirty-three to thirty-six hours at a stretch, calling this two days'
work, and paying for it at this rate. If they work fractions of a day,
eight hours is called a half and four a quarter day, and the men submit
with the same patience as the women.

For the former this is in part a question of nationality, the sweater's
workmen being made up chiefly of German and Polish Jews and the poorer
foreign element. An English worker has generally learned the trade as a
whole, and is secure of better place and pay; but a Polish Jew, a
carpenter at home, goes at once into a sweater's shop, and after a few
weeks has learned one branch of the trade, and is enrolled on the list
of workers. For the women, however, there is a smaller proportion
comparatively of foreigners. The poor Englishwoman, like the poor
American, has no resource save her needle or some form of machine work.
If ambitious, she learns button-holing, and in some cases makes as high
as thirty shillings per week ($7.50). This, however, is only for the
best paid work. Out of this she must find her own materials, which can
never be less than two and sixpence (60c.). A woman of this order would
do in a day twelve coats with six button-holes each, for the best class
of work getting a penny a hole, or two cents. For commoner kinds the
prices are a descending scale: three-quarters of a penny a hole, half a
penny, eight holes for threepence, and the commonest kinds three holes
for a penny. These are the rates for coats. For waistcoats the price is
usually a penny for four button-holes, a skilled worker making sixteen
in an hour. Many of these button-hole makers have become sweaters on
their own account, and display quite as much ingenuity at cutting rates
as the men at whose hands they may themselves have suffered.

For the machinists and fellers the rates vary. A good machinist may
earn five shillings a day ($1.25), but this only in the busy season; the
feller, at the best, can seldom go beyond three or four, and at the
worst earns but six or eight per week; while learners and general hands
make from two to six shillings a week, much of their time being spent in
carrying work between the shops and the warehouses. Six shillings a week
represents a purchasing power of about forty cents a day, half of which
must be reserved for rent; and thus it will be seen that the English
workwoman of the lower grade is in much the same condition as the
American worker, hours, wages, and results being nearly identical. The
Jewish women and girls represent a formidable element to contend with,
as they are now coming over in great numbers, and the question has so
organized itself that each falls almost at once into her own place, and
works with machine-like regularity and efficiency.

In one of the houses in a narrow little street opening off from
Whitechapel, were three women whose cases may be cited as representative
ones. The first was a trouser machinist, and took her work from another
woman, a sweater, who had it from city and other houses. She was paid
threepence (6c.) a pair, and could do ten pairs a day, if she got up at
six and worked till ten or eleven, which was her usual custom. In the
next room was a woman who stitched very thick large trousers, for which
she received fourpence a pair. She also had them from a woman who took
them from a sub-contractor. She could make six and sometimes seven
shillings a week, her rent being two shillings and sixpence. On the
floor above was a waistcoat maker, who, when work was brisk, could earn
eight and sometimes nine shillings a week; but who now, as work was
slack, seldom went beyond six or seven. Out of this must be taken
thread, which she got for eightpence a dozen. She worked for a small
exporter in a street some ten minutes' walk away; but often had to spend
two hours or more taking back her work and waiting for more to be given
out. She fared better than some, however, as she knew women who many a
time had had to lose five or six hours--"just so much bread out of their
mouths."

"The work has to be passed," she said, "and there's never any doubt
about mine, because I was bound to the trade, and my mother paid a pound
for premium, and I worked three months for nothing--two months of that
was clear gain to them, for I took to it and learned quick. But it's a
starvation trade now, whatever it used to be."

"Why don't some of the best workers among you combine and get your work
direct from the city house?"

"I've 'ad that in me mind, but there's never money enough. There's a
deposit to be made for guarantee, and the machine-rent and all. No,
there's never money enough. It's just keeping soul and body together,
and barely that. We don't see butcher's meat half a dozen times a year;
it's tea and bread, and you lose your relish for much of anything else,
unless sprats maybe, or a taste of shrimps. I was in one workshop a
while where there was over-hours always, and one night the inspector
happened along after hours, and no word passed down, and the man turned
me into the yard and turned off the gas; but I had to work two hours
after he was gone. I'm better off than the woman in the next room. She
makes children's suits--coats and knickerbockers--for ha'penny a piece,
with tuppence for finishing, and her cotton to find; and, do 'er best,
she won't make over four shillings and threepence a week, sometimes
less. There's a mother and daughter next door that were bound to their
trade for three months, and the daughter gave three months' work to
learn it; but the most they make on children's suits is eight shillings
and sixpence the two, and they work fifteen and sixteen hours a day."

This record of a house or two in Whitechapel is the record of street
after street in working London. No trade into which the needle enters
has escaped the system which has been perfected little by little till
there is no loophole by which the lower order of worker can escape. The
sweaters themselves are often kind-hearted men, ground by the system,
but soon losing any sensitiveness; and the mass of eager applicants are
constantly reinforced, not only by the steady pressure of emigrants of
all nations, but by an influx from the country. In short, conditions
are generally the same for London as New York, but intensified for the
former by the enormous numbers, and the fact that outlying spaces do not
mean a better chance. This problem of one great city is the problem of
all; and in each and all the sweater stands as an integral part of
modern civilization. Often far less guilty than he is counted to be, and
often as much a sufferer as his workers from those above him, his
mission has legitimate place only where ignorant and incompetent workers
must be kept in order, and may well give place to factory labor. With
skill comes organization and the power to claim better wages; and with
both skilled labor and co-operation the sweater has no further place,
and is transformed to foreman or superintendent. Till this is
accomplished, the word must stand, as it does to-day, for all imaginable
evil that can hedge about both worker and work.




CHAPTER V.

CHILD OF THE EAST END.


"What is it to be a lady?" The voice was the voice of a small and
exceedingly grimy child, who held in her arms one still smaller and even
grimier, known to the neighborhood as "Wemock's Orlando." Under ordinary
circumstances, neither Wemock's nor anybody's youngest could have
excited the least attention in Tower Hamlets where every doorway and
passage swarms with children. But Orlando had the proud distinction of
having spent three months of his short life in hospital, "summat wrong
with his inside" having resulted from the kick of a drunken father who
objected to the sight or sound of the children he had brought into the
world, these at present numbering but seven, four having been mercifully
removed from further dispensation of strap and fist and heavy boot.

Such sympathy as the over-worked drudges who constituted the wives of
the neighborhood had to spare, had concentrated on Orlando, whose
"inside" still continued wrong, and who, though almost three, had never
been able to bear his weight on his feet, but became livid at once, if
the experiment was tried,--a fact of perennial interest to the entire
alley.

Wemock's fury at this state of things was something indescribable. A
"casual" at the Docks, with the uncertainty of work which is the
destruction of the casual laborer, he regarded the children as simply a
species of investment, slow of making any return, but certain in the
end. Up to five, say, they must be fed and housed somehow, but from five
on a boy of any spirit ought to begin a career as mud-lark to graduate
from it in time into anything for which this foundation had fitted him.
The girls were less available, and he blessed his stars that there were
but three, and cursed them as he reflected that Polly was tied hand and
foot to Orlando, who persisted in living, and equally persisted in
clinging to Polly, who mothered him more thoroughly than any previous
Wemock had been.

Not that the actual mother had not some gleams of tenderness, at least
for the babies. But life weighed heavily against any demonstration. She
was simply a beast of burden, patient, and making small complaint, and
adding to the intermittent family income in any way she could,--charing,
tailoring, or sack-making when the machine was not in pawn, and standing
in deadly terror of Wemock's fist. The casual, like most of the lower
order of laborers, has small opinion of women as a class, and meets any
remonstrance from them as to his habits with an unvarying formula.

"I'm yer 'usban', ain't I?" is the reply to request or objection alike,
and "husband" by the casual is defined as "a man with a right to knock
his woman down when he likes." This simplifies responsibility, and,
being accepted with little or no question by the women, allows great
latitude of action.

Wemock had learned that the strap was safer than a knock-down, however,
as a dose of it overnight did not hinder his wife from crawling out of
bed to prepare the breakfast and get to work, whereas a kick such as he
preferred, had been known to disable her for a week, with inconvenient
results as to his own dinners and suppers.

"It's the liquor as does it. 'E's peaceable enough when the liquor's out
of 'im. But their 'ands comes so 'eavy. They don't know how 'eavy their
'ands comes." Thus Mrs. Wemock, standing in the doorway, for the moment
holding Orlando, who resented his transfer with a subdued howl of grief,
and looked anxiously down the alley toward Polly's retreating figure.

"'Ush now an' ma'll give him a winkle. Polly's gone for winkles. It's
winkles we'll 'ave for supper, and a blessing it's there's one thing
cheap and with some taste to it. A penny-'orth even, goes quite a way,
but a penny-'orth ain't much when there's a child to each winkle an' may
be two."

"The churchyard's been a better friend to me than to you," said a thin
and haggard-looking woman, who had come across the street for a look at
Orlando. "Out of my seventeen, there ain't but six left an' one o' them
is in the Colonies. There's small call to wish 'em alive, when there's
nought but sorrow ahead. If we was ladies I suppose it might all be
different."

It was at this point that Polly's question was heard,--Polly, who had
rushed back with the winkles and put the dish into her mother's hand and
caught Orlando as if she had been separated from him hours instead of
minutes. And Orlando in turn put his skinny little arms about her neck.
Whatever might be wrong with his inside, the malady had not reached his
heart, which beat only for Polly, his great dark eyes, hollow with
suffering, fixing themselves on her face with a sort of adoration.

"A lady?" Mrs. Wemock said reflectively, eying her winkles, "there's
more than one kind, Polly. A lady's mostly one that has nought to do but
what she likes, and goes in a carriage for fear she'll soil her feet.
But I've seen real ladies that thought on the poor, and was in and out
among 'em. That kind is 'ard to find, Polly. I never knew but two an'
they're both dead. It's them as has money, that's ladies, and them that
hasn't--why they isn't."

"Then I can't be a lady," said Polly. "I heard Nelly Anderson say she
meant to be a lady."

"Lord keep you from that kind!" said the mother hastily, with a
significant look at her neighbor, which Polly did not fail to note and
puzzle over. Tending Orlando gave her much time for puzzling. She was
known as an "old fashioned" child, with ways quite her own, always to be
depended upon, and confiding in no one but Orlando, who answered her in
a language of his own.

"When I am a lady, we will go away somewhere together," Polly said. "I
think I shall be a lady sometime, Orlando, and then we'll have good
times. There are good times somewhere, only they don't get into the
Buildings," and with a look at the sooty walls and the dirty passage she
followed her mother slowly up the stairs, and took her three winkles and
the big slice of bread and dripping, which she and Orlando were to
share, into the corner. Orlando must be coaxed to eat, which was always
a work of time, and before her own share had been swallowed, her
father's step was on the stairs, and her mother turned round from the
machine.

"Keep out of the way, Polly. 'E's taken too much, I know by the step of
'im, and 'e won't 'alf know what he's about."

Polly shrunk back. There was no time to get under the bed, which she
often did, and she hugged Orlando close and waited fearfully. Both were
silent, but she put her bread behind her. To see them eating sometimes
enraged him, and he had been known to fling loaf and teapot both from
the windows.

Both were on the table now, two or three slices spread with dripping for
the younger boys who would presently come in. Wemock sat down, his hands
in his pockets and his legs stretched out to their utmost length, and
looked first at his wife who was stitching trousers, and then at Polly,
whose eyes were fixed upon him.

"I'll teach you to look at me like that, you brat," he said, rising
slowly.

"For the Lord's sake, Wemock!" his wife cried, for there was deeper
mischief than usual in his tone. "Remember what you did to Orlando."

"I'll do for him again. I've 'ad enough of him always hunder foot. Out
o' the way, you fool."

Polly looked toward the door. A beating for herself could be taken, but
never for Orlando. Her mother had come between, and she saw her father
strike her heavily, and then push her into the chair.

"Go on with your trousers," he said. "There's no money at the Docks, and
these children eating me out of house and home. A man might be master of
his own. Come 'ere. You won't, won't you? Then--"

There were oaths and a shriek from Orlando, on whom the strap had
fallen; and then Polly, still holding him, rushed for the door, only to
be caught back and held, while the heavy fist came down with cruel
weight.

"Wemock's a bit worse than common," they said in the next room as the
sounds began; but the shrieks in another moment had drawn every one in
the Buildings, and the doorway filled with faces, no one volunteering,
however, to interfere with the Briton's right to deal with his own as
he will. He had flung Polly from him, and she lay on the floor
unconscious and bleeding. Orlando had crept under the bed, and lay there
paralyzed with terror; and the mother shrieked so loudly that the brute
slunk back and seated himself again with attempted indifference.

"You've done for yourself this time," a neighbor said, and Wemock sprang
up, too late to escape the policemen who had been brought by the sounds,
not usual in broad daylight, and who suddenly had their hands upon him,
while another stooped doubtfully over the child.

"She's alive," he said. "They take a deal to kill 'em, such do, but
she'll need the 'ospital. Her arm's broke."

He lifted the arm as he spoke, and it fell limp, a cry of pain coming
from the child, whose eyes had opened a moment and then closed with a
look of death on the face. An ambulance was passing. Some one had been
hurt on the Docks, where accidents are always happening, and was being
carried to the hospital; and a neighbor ran down.

"It's best to do it sudden," she said, "or Orlando 'll never let her go
or her mother either," and she hailed the ambulance driver, who
objected to taking two, but agreed when he found it was only a child.

Polly came to herself at last, gasping with pain. A broken arm was the
least of it. There was a broken rib as well, and bruises innumerable.
But worse than any pain was the separation from Orlando, for whom Polly
wailed, till, in despair, the nurse promised to speak to the surgeon and
see if he might not be brought; and, satisfied with this hope, the child
lay quiet and waited.

She was in a clean bed,--such a bed as she had never seen, and her soft
dark eyes examined the nurse and all the strange surroundings in the
intervals of pain. But fever came soon, and in long days of unconscious
murmurings and tossings, all that was left of Polly's thin little frame
wasted away.

"It is a hopeless case," the doctor said, "though after all with
children you can never tell."

There came a day when Polly opened her eyes, quite conscious, and looked
up once more at the nurse with the old appeal.

"I want Orlando. Where's Orlando?"

"He can't come," the nurse said, after a moment, in which she turned
away.

"You promised," Polly said faintly.

"I know it," the nurse said. "He should come if he could, but he can't."

"Is he sick?" Polly said after a pause. "Did father hurt him?"

"Yes, he hurt him. He hurt him very much, but he can never hurt him any
more. Orlando is dead."

Polly lay quite silent, nor did her face change as she heard the words;
but a smile came presently, and her eyes lightened.

"You didn't know," she said. "Orlando has come. He is right here, and
somebody is carrying him. He is putting out his arms."

The child had raised herself, and looked eagerly toward the foot of the
bed, "She is bringing him to me. She says, 'Polly, you 're going to be a
lady and never do what you don't want to any more.' I thought I should
be a lady sometime, because I wanted to so much; but I didn't think it
would be so soon. They won't know me in the Buildings. I'm going to be a
lady, and never--"

Polly's eyes had closed. She fell back. What she had seen no man could
know, but the smile stayed.

It was quite certain that something at least had come to her of what she
wanted.




CHAPTER VI.

AMONG THE DRESSMAKERS.


"An Englishman's house is his castle," and an Englishwoman's no less,
and both he and she ward off intruders with an energy inherited from the
days when all men were fighters, and intensified by generations of
practice. Even a government inspector is looked upon with deep disfavor
as one result of the demoralization brought about by liberal and other
loose ways of viewing public rights. The private, self-constituted one,
it may then be judged rightly, is regarded as a meddlesome and pestilent
busybody seeking knowledge which nobody should wish to obtain, and
another illustration of what the nineteenth century is coming to.
Various committees of inquiry, from the Organized Charities and from
private bodies of workers, visit manufactories and industries in
general, where women are employed, to make it evident that there is a
desire to know how they fare. Why this wish has arisen, and why things
are not allowed to remain as the fathers left them, are two questions at
present distracting the British employer's mind, and likely, before the
inquiry is ended, to distract it more, as, day by day, the numbers
increase of those who persist in believing that they are in some degree
their brothers' keepers,--a doctrine questioned ever since the story of
time began. Obstacles of every nature are placed in the way of legalized
inspection, and evasion and subterfuge, masterly enough to furnish a
congress of diplomatists with ideas, are in daily practice. Years of
experience make the inspector no less astute, and so the war goes on.

It will be seen then, what difficulties hedge about the private
inquirer, who must go armed with every obtainable guarantee, and even
then leave the field quite conscious that the informants are chuckling
over a series of misleading statements, and that not much will be made
of that case. So little organization exists among the workers
themselves, and there is such deadly fear of losing a place that women
and girls listen silently to statements, which they denounce afterwards
as absolutely false. Natural as this is,--and it is one of the
inevitable results of the system,--it is one of the worst obstacles in
the way, not only of inquiry but any statements of results.

"Of course he lied or she lied," they say, "but don't for anything in
the world let them know that we said so or that you know anything about
it."

This injunction, which for the individual worker's sake must be
scrupulously attended to, hampers not only inquiry but reform, and
delays still further the attempts at organization made here and there.
The system applied to dressmaking, our present topic, differs from
anything known in America save in one of its phases, and merits some
description, representing as it does some lingering remnant of the old
apprentice system.

For the West End there is generally but one method. And here it may be
said that the West End ignores absolutely any knowledge of what the East
End methods may be. Between them there is a great gulf fixed, and the
poorest apprentice of a West End house regards herself as infinitely
superior to the mistress of an East End business. For this charmed
region of the West, whether large or small, has spent years in building
up a reputation, and this is a portion of the guarantee that goes with
the worker, who has learned her trade under their auspices. It is a slow
process,--so slow, that the system is not likely to be adopted by hasty
Americans. In a first-class house in the West End, Oxford and Regent
Streets having almost a monopoly of this title, the premium demanded for
an apprentice is from forty to sixty pounds. This makes her what is
known as an "indoor apprentice," and entitles her to board and lodgings
for two years. Numbers are taken at once, beds are set close together in
the rooms provided, and board is made of the cheapest, to prevent loss.
This would seem very small, but add to it the fact, that the apprentice
gives from twelve to sixteen hours a day of time and a year of time as
assistant after the first probation is past, and it will be seen, that,
even with no fee, the house is hardly likely to lose much.

The out-door apprentices pay usually ten pounds and board and lodge at
home, but hours are the same; never less than twelve, and in the busy
season, fourteen and sixteen. Tea is furnished them once a day, but no
food, nor is there definite time for meals. In the case of in-door
apprentices, with any rush of work, a supper is provided at ten, but the
"out-doors" must bring such food as is needed. For them there is, as for
learners, no pay for over-time; and the strain often costs the life of
the country girls unused to confinement, who fall into quick
consumption, induced not only by long hours of sitting bent over work,
but by breathing air foul with the vile gas and want of ventilation, as
well as, in many cases, the worst possible sanitary conditions. If the
initiatory period is safely past, the apprentice becomes an "improver;"
that is, she is allowed larger choice of work, looks on or even tries
her own hand when draping is to be done, and if quick is shortly ranked
as an assistant. With this stage comes a small wage. An out-door
apprentice now earns from four to five shillings ($1.25) a week. The
in-door one still receives only board, but soon graduates from second
to first assistant, though the whole process requires not less than four
years and is often made to cover six. As first assistant she is likely
to have quarters slightly more comfortable than those of the
apprentices, and she receives one pound a week,--often less, but never
more. In case of over-time, this meaning anything over the twelve hours
which is regarded as a day's work, various rates are paid. In the
mourning department of one of the best known Oxford Street
establishments, fourpence an hour is allowed. This rate is exceptionally
high, being given because of the objection to evening work on black. The
same house pays in the colored-suit department two and a half pence
(5c.) an hour, and provides tea for the hands. Twopence an hour is given
in several other houses, but for the majority nothing whatever.

The forewoman of one of these establishments began as an apprentice
something over thirty years ago, and in giving these details and many
others not included, expressed her own surprise that the amount of
agitation as to over-time had produced so little tangible result.

"The houses are on the lookout, it's true," she said; "and each one is
afraid of getting into the papers for violating the law, so the
apprentice is looked out for a little better than she was in my time.
I've worked many a time when there was a press of work--some sudden
order to be filled--all night long. They gave us plenty of tea, a hot
supper at ten, and something else at two, but they never paid a
farthing, and it never came to one of us that we'd any right to ask it.
There was one--a plucky little woman and a splendid hand. She was first
assistant and we'd been going on like this a week one year. The girls
fell fainting from their chairs. I did myself though I was used to it;
and she stood up there at midnight, just before the manager came in and
said, 'Girls, you've no right to take another stitch without pay. Who'll
stand by me if I say so when Mr. B. comes in.' Not one spoke. 'Oh, you
cowards!' she said. 'Not one? Then I'll speak for you.' Two rose up then
and threw down their work. ''Tis a burning shame,' says they. 'Say what
you like!' Mr. B. was there before the words were out of their mouths,
'What's this? what's this?' he said. 'Not at work and the order to go
out at noon?' 'Pay us then for double work, and not drive us like galley
slaves,' said Mrs. Colman, standing very straight, 'I speak for myself
and for the rest. We are going home.'

"The manager got purple. 'The first one that leaves this room, by G--,
she'll never come back. What do you mean getting up this row, damn you?'
'I mean we're earning double, and ought to have it. Why shouldn't our
pockets hold some of the profits on this order as well as yours?' 'Will
you hush?' he says with his hand up as if he'd strike. 'No; not now, nor
ever,' she says, she white and he purple, and out she walked; but none
followed her. She never came back, and she was marked from that time, so
she found it hard to get work. But she married again and went out to the
Colonies, so she hadn't to fight longer. It's over-time now, as much as
then, that is the greatest trouble. We had a Mutual Improvement Society
when I was young, but oh, what hard work it was to go to it after nine
in the evening and try to work, and it's hard work now, though people
think you can be as brisk and wide awake after sewing twelve hours as if
you'd been enjoying yourself."

In 1875 a few dressmakers, who had observed intelligently various
organizations among men-tailors, boot-makers, etc., started an
association of the "dressmakers, milliners, and mantua makers," designed
for mutual benefit, a subscription of twopence per week being added to a
small entrance fee. Rules were drawn up, one or two of which are given
illustratively.


     "Each person on joining is required to pay _one penny_ for a copy
     of the rules, _one penny_ for a card on which her payments will be
     entered, and _one shilling_ entrance fee--but the last may be paid
     by instalments of fourpence each. After thirty years of age the
     entrance fee shall be 6_d._ extra for every additional ten years.

     "Members not working in a business house, or not working in the
     above trades, can only claim sick benefits, but the usual death
     levy shall also be made for them.

     "In case of death each member will be called upon to contribute
     _sixpence_ to be expended as the deceased member may have directed.

     "When a member is disabled by sickness (excepting in
     confinements), a notice must be signed by two members as vouchers
     to the secretary, who shall appoint the member living nearest to
     the sick member, with one member of the committee, to visit her
     weekly, and report to the committee before the allowance is paid,
     unless special circumstances require a relaxation of this rule. The
     committee may require a medical certificate."


Excellent as every provision was, and admirable work as was
accomplished, the women, as is too often the case with women, lost
mutual confidence, or could not be made to see the advantage of paying
punctually, and the association dwindled down to a mere handful. In 1878
it reorganized, and its secretary, a working dressmaker, who learned her
trade in a West End house, has labored in unwearied fashion to bring
about some _esprit du corps_ and though often baffled, speaks
courageously still of the better time coming when women will have some
sense of the value of organization. Her word confirms the facts gathered
at many points in both East and West End. The East has reduced wages to
starvation limit. A pound a week can still be earned in some houses at
the West End--though fourteen or sixteen shillings is more usual; but
for the other side, fourteen is still the highest point, and the scale
descends to five and six--in one case to three and sixpence. Over hours,
scanty food, exhaustion, wasting sickness, and death, the friend at
last, when the weary days are done;--this is the day for most. The
American worker has distinct advantages on her side, the long unpaid
apprenticeship here having no counterpart there, and the frightfully
long working day being also shortened. Many other disabilities are the
same, but in this trade the advantage thus far is wholly for the
American worker.




CHAPTER VII.

NELLY, A WEST-END MILLINER'S APPRENTICE.


What Polly had heard, listening silently, with "Wemock's Orlando" held
close in her small arms, was quite true. Nelly Sanderson had determined
to be a lady, and though uncertain as yet as to how it was to be brought
about, felt that it must come. This she had made up her mind to when not
much older than Polly, and the desire had grown with her. It was
perfectly plain from the difference between her and Jim that Nature had
meant her for something better than to stitch shirt-bodies endlessly. At
twelve she had begun to do this, portions of two or three previous years
having been spent in a Board School. Then her time for work and
contribution to the family support had come. She was only a "feller,"
and took her weekly bundle of work from a woman, who, in turn, had it
from another woman, who took it from a master-sweater, who dealt
directly with the great city houses; and between them all, Nelly's wage
was kept at the lowest point. But she did her work well, and was quick
to a marvel; and her hope for the future carried her on through the
monotonous days, broken only by her mother's scolding and Jim's
insolence.

Jim was the typical East End loafer,--a bullet head, closely cropped;
dull round eyes, and fat nose, also rounded; a thick neck, and fat
cheeks, in which were plainly to be seen the overdoses of beer and
spirits he had drunk since he was ten or twelve years old.

His mother had tried to keep him respectable. She had been a lady's
maid; but that portion of her life was buried in mystery. It was only
known she had come to Norwood Street when Nelly was a baby, and that
very shortly Judkins, a young omnibus conductor, had fallen in love with
her; and they had married, and taken rooms, and lived very comfortably
till Jim was three or four years old. But the taste for liquor was too
strong; and long days in fog and rain, chilled to the marrow under the
swollen gray clouds of the London winter, were some excuse for the rush
to the "public" at the end of each trip. The day's wages at last were
all swallowed, and the wife, like a good proportion of workmen's wives,
found herself chief bread-winner, and tried first one trade and then
another, till Nelly's quick fingers grew serviceable.

Nelly was pretty,--more than pretty. Even Jim had moments of admiration;
and the Buildings, in which several of her admirers lived, had seen
unending fights as to who had the best right to take her out on Sundays.
Her waving red-brown hair, her great eyes matching it in tint to a
shade, her long black lashes and delicate brows, the low white forehead
and clear pale cheeks,--anybody could see that these were far and away
beyond any girl in the Buildings. The lips were too full, and the nose
no particular shape; but the quick-moving, slender figure, like her
mother's, and the delicate hands, which Nelly hated to soil, and kept as
carefully as possible,--all these were indications over which the women,
in conclave over tea and shrimps, shook their heads.

"'Er father was a gentleman, that's plain to see. She'll go the same
way her mother did. I'd not 'ave one of my hown boys take up with her,
not for no money."

This seemed the general verdict in the Buildings; and though Nelly sewed
steadily all day and every day, the women still held to it, the men
hotly contesting it, and family quarrels over the subject confirming the
impression. Nelly worked on, however, unmoved by criticism or approval,
spending all that could be saved from the housekeeping on the most
stylish clothes to be found in Petticoat Lane market, and denying
herself even in these for the sake of a little hoard, which accumulated,
oh! so slowly since it had been broken into, once for a new feather for
her little hat, once for a day's pleasuring at Greenwich; and Nelly
resolved firmly it should never happen again.

One ambition filled her. This hateful East End must be left somehow.
Somehow she must get to be the lady which she felt sure she ought to be.
There were hints of this sometimes in her mother's talk; but it was
plain that there was nobody to help her to this but herself. Already
Jim drank more than his share. He was going the way of his father, dead
years before in a drunken frolic; and the income made from the little
shop her mother had opened, to teach him how to make a living, covered
expenses, and not much more. Whatever was done for Nelly must be done by
herself.

The way had opened, or begun to open, at Greenwich. A tall, delicate
girl, who proved to be a milliner's apprentice, had taken a fancy to
her, and given her her first real knowledge of the delights of West End
life. She had nearly ended her apprenticeship, and would soon be a
regular hand; and Nelly listened entranced to the description of
marvellous hats and bonnets, and the people who tried them on, and
looked disgustingly at her own.

"You've got a touch, I know," the new friend said approvingly. "You'd
get on. Isn't there anybody to pay the premium for you?"

Nelly shook her head sorrowfully. "They couldn't do without me," she
said. "There's mother and Jim, that won't try to earn anything, and I
stitch now twelve hours a day. I'm off shirts, and on trousers. Trousers
pay better. I've made eighteen shillings a week sometimes, but you must
keep at it steady ahead for that."

"It's a pity," her companion said reflectively. "You'd learn quick. In
three months you'd be an improver, and begin to earn, and then there's
no knowing where you'd stop. You might get to be owner."

Nelly turned suddenly. She had felt for some time that some one was
listening to them. They were on the boat, sitting on the central seat,
back to back with a row of merry-makers; but this was some one
different.

"I beg your pardon," he said; and Nelly flushed with pleasure at a tone
no one had ever used before. "I have heard a little you were saying. I
am interested in this question of wages, and very anxious to know more
about it. I wish you would tell me what you know about this stitching."

He had come round to their side--a tall blond man of thirty, dressed in
light gray, and a note-book in his hand. He was so serious and gentle
that it was impossible to take offence, and very soon Nelly was telling
him all she knew of prices in cheap clothing of every sort, and how the
workers lived. She hated it all,--the grime and sordidness, the drunken
men and screaming children; and her eyes flashed as she talked of it,
and a flush came to her cheeks.

"You ought to have something better," the young man said presently, his
eyes fixed upon her. "We must try to find something better."

Nelly's companion smiled significantly, but he did not notice it.
Evidently he was unlike most of the gentlemen she had seen in the West
End. Yet he certainly was a gentleman. He took them to a small
restaurant when Nelly had answered all his questions, and they dined
sumptuously, or so it seemed to them, and he sat by them and told
stories, and entertained them generally all the way home.

"I shall go down the river next Sunday," he said low to Nelly as they
landed. "Do you like to row? If you do, come to Chelsea to the Bridge,
and we will try it from there."

This was the beginning, and for many weeks it meant simply that he
pleased his æsthetic sense, as well as convinced himself that he was
doing a good and righteous deed in making life brighter for an East End
toiler. He had given her the premium, and Nelly, without any actual lie,
had convinced her mother that the West End milliner was willing to take
her for only two months of time given, and then begin wages. She brought
out her own little fund, swollen by several shillings taken from one of
the sovereigns given her, and proved that there was enough here to keep
them till she began to earn wages again; and Mrs. Judkins allowed
herself at last to be persuaded, feeling that a chance had come for the
girl which must not be allowed to pass.

So Nelly's apprenticeship began. There was less rose-color than she had
imagined. The hours were long, longer sometimes than her stitching had
been, and many of the girls looked at her jealously. But Maria, her
first friend, remained her friend. The two sat side by side, and Nelly
caught the knack by instinct almost, and even in the first week or two
caught a smile from Madame, who paused to consider the twist of a bow,
quite Parisian in its effect, and said to herself that here was a hand
who would prove valuable.

Nelly went home triumphant that night, and even her mother's sour face
relaxed. She had taken up trouser-stitching again, forcing Jim to mind
the shop, and saying to herself that the family fortunes were going to
mend, and that Nelly would do it. Sundays were always free. Nobody
questioned the girl. The young men in the Buildings and the street gave
up pursuit. Plainly Nelly was not for them, but had found her proper
place in the West End. They bowed sarcastically, and said, "'Ow's your
Royal 'Ighness?" when they met; but Nelly hardly heeded them. The long
wish had taken shape at last,--she was going to be a lady.

Summer ended. There was no more boating, but there were still long walks
and excursions. The apprenticeship was over, and Nelly was now a regular
hand, and farther advanced than many who had worked a year or two. She
made good wages, often a pound a week. Her dress was all that such a
shop demanded; her manner quieter every day.

"She's a lady, that's plain," Maria said; and Madame agreed with her,
and took the girl more and more into favor. Nelly had a little room of
her own now, next to Maria. She seldom went home, save to take money to
her mother, and she never stayed long.

"It's best not," Mrs. Judkins said. "You're bound for something better,
and you'll get it. This isn't your place. You're a bit pale, Nelly. It's
the hours and the close room, I suppose?"

"Yes; it's the hours," Nelly said. "When there's a press, we're often
kept on till nine or ten; but it's a good place."

She lingered to-day till Jim came in. Jim grew worse and worse, and she
hurried away as she saw him swaggering toward the door; but there were
tears in her eyes as she turned away. She passed her friend of the
summer in Regent Street, and looked back for a moment. He had nodded,
but was talking busily with a tall man, who eyed Nelly sharply. She had
found that he lived in Chelsea, and was a literary man of some
sort,--she hardly knew what,--and that his name was Stanley; beyond
this she knew nothing. Some day he would make her a lady,--but when?
There was need of haste. No one knew how great need.

Another month or two, the winter well upon them, and there came a day
when Madame, who, as Nelly entered the workroom, had stopped for a
moment and looked at her, first in surprise, then in furious anger,
burst out upon her in words that scorched the ears to hear. No girl like
that need sit down among decent girls. March, and never show her
shameful face again.

Nelly rose silently, and took down her hat and shawl, and as silently
went out, Madame's shrill voice still sounding. What should she do? The
end was near. She could not go home. She must find Herbert, and tell
him; but he would not be at home before night. She knew his number now,
and how to find him. He must make it all right. She went into Hyde Park
and walked about, and when she grew too cold, into a cocoa-room, and so
the day wore away; and at five she took a Chelsea omnibus, and leaned
back in the corner thinking what to say. The place was easily found,
and she knocked, with her heart beating heavily, and her voice trembling
as a maid opened the door and looked at her a moment.

"Come this way," she said, certain it must be a lady,--a visitor from
the country, perhaps; and Nelly followed her into a back drawing-room,
where a lady sat with a baby on her lap, and two or three children about
her. A little boy ran forward, then stood still, his frightened,
surprised eyes on Nelly's eyes, which were fixed upon him in terror.

"Whose is he?--whose?" she stammered.

"He is Herbert Stanley, junior," the lady said with a smile. "I'm Mrs.
Stanley. Good Heaven! what is it?"

Nelly had stood for a moment, her hands reaching out blindly, the card
with its name and number still in them.

"I must go," she said. "I must look for the real Herbert. This is
another." She fell as the words ended, still holding the card tight; and
when they had revived her, only shook her head as questions were asked.
The boy stood looking at her with his father's eyes. There could be no
doubt. Nelly rose and looked around; then, with no word to tell who she
might be, went out into the night. She crossed the street, and stood
hesitating; and as she stood a figure came swiftly down the street on
the other side, and ran up the steps of the house she had left. There
was no doubt any more; and with a long, bitter cry Nelly fled toward the
river. There was no pause. She knew the way well, and if she had not,
instinct would have led her, and did lead, through narrow alleys and
turnings till the embankment was reached. No stop, even then. A
policeman saw the flying figure, and a man who tried to hinder her heard
the words, "I shall never be a lady now," but that was all; and when he
saw her face again the river had done its work, and the story was plain,
though for its inner pages only the man who was her murderer has the
key.




CHAPTER VIII.

LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS.


Bloomsbury has a cheerful sound, and, like Hop Vine Garden and Violet
Lane, and other titles no less reassuring, seems to promise a breath of
something better than the soot-laden atmosphere offered by a London
winter. But Hop Vine Garden is but a passage between a line of old
buildings, and ends in a dark court and a small and dirty "public," the
beer-pots of which hold the only suggestion of hops to be discovered.
Violet Lane is given over to cat's-meat and sausage makers, the
combination breeding painful suspicions in the seeker's mind, and
Bloomsbury has long since ceased to own sight or smell of any growing
thing.

But, in a gray and forlorn old group of houses known as Clark's
Buildings, will be found, on certain evenings in the month, a little
knot of women, each with open account-book, studying over small piles of
pence and silver, and if their looks are any indication, drawing very
little satisfaction from the operation. They are the secretaries of the
little societies organized by the late Mrs. Patterson, who, like many
other philanthropists, came to see that till the workers themselves were
roused to the consciousness of necessity for union, but little could be
accomplished for them. A few of the more intelligent, stirred by her
deep earnestness, banded together twelve years ago, and organized a
society known as "The Society of Women Employed in Shirt, Collar, and
Under-linen Making;" and here may be found the few who have, from long
and sharp experience, discovered the chief needs of workers in these
trades. When outward conditions as they show themselves at present have
been studied, when homes and hours and wages and all the details of the
various branches have become familiar, it is to this dim little hall
that one comes for a final puzzle over all that is wrong.

For it is all wrong; nor in any corner of working London, can any fact
or figures make a right of the toil that is an old, old story; so old
that there is even impatience if one tells it again. Numbers are
unknown, each one who investigates giving a different result; but it is
quite safe to say that five hundred thousand women live by the
industries named in the society's title, not one of whom has ever
received, or ever will receive, under the present system, a wage which
goes beyond bare subsistence. Here, as in New York, or any other large
city of the United States, the conditions governing the trade are much
the same. The women, untrained and unskilled in every other direction,
turn to these branches of sewing as the possibility for all, and scores
wait for any and every chance of work from manufactory or small house.
As with us, the work is chiefly put out, and necessarily at once arises
the middle-man, or a gradation of middle-men, each of whom must have his
profit, taken in every case--not from employer, but worker. The employer
fixes his rates without reference to these. He is fighting, also, for
subsistence, plus as many luxuries as can be added from the profits of
his superior power over conditions. He may be, and often is, to those
nearest him, kind, unselfish, eager for right. But the hands are
"hands," and that is all; and the middle-man, of whom the very same
statement may be true, deals with the hands with an equal obliviousness
as to their connection with bodies and souls.

The original price per dozen of the garments made may be the highest in
the market, but before the woman who works is reached there are often
five, and sometimes more, transfers. Where workers are employed on the
premises, they fare better, being paid by the piece. The minutest
divisions of labor prevail, even more than with us--a shirt passing
through many hands, the weekly wage differing for each. The "fitter,"
for instance, must be a skilled workwoman, the flatness and proper set
of the shirt front depending upon correct fitting at the neck. For this
fitting in West End houses, the fitter receives a penny a shirt, and can
in a week fit twenty dozen--this meaning a pound a week. But slack
seasons reduce the amount, so that often she earns but nine or ten
shillings, her average for the year being about fourteen. For the grades
below her the sum is proportionately less. The most thoroughly skilled
hand in either shirt-making or under-linen has been known to make as
high as twenty-eight shillings a week ($7.00), but this is phenomenal;
nor, indeed, does any such possibility remain, prices having gone down
steadily for some years. A pound a week for a woman, as has been stated
elsewhere, is regarded even by just employers as all that can be
required by the most exacting; and with this standard in mind, a fall of
three or four shillings seems a matter of slight importance.

Taking the various industries in which women are employed, the needle,
as usual, leading, and the shirt-makers being a large per cent of the
number, there are in London nearly a million women, self-supporting and
self-respecting, and often the sole dependence of a family. This
excludes the numbers of thriftless and otherwise helpless poor whose
work is variable, and who, at the best, can earn only the lowest
possible wages as unskilled laborers. For the skilled ones, doing their
best in long days of work, never less than twelve hours, the average
earnings, after all chances of slack seasons and accidents have been
taken into account, is never over ten shillings a week. It is worth
while to consider what ten shillings can do.

The allowance per head for rations for the old people in the Whitechapel
Workhouse, one of the best of its class, is according to the
authorities, three shillings eleven pence (96c.) per week, the quantity
falling somewhat below the amount which physiologists regard as
necessary for an able-bodied adult. These supplies are purchased by
contract, and thus a full third lower than the single buyer can command.
But she has learned that appetite is not a point to be considered, and
for the most part confines herself to tea and bread and butter, with a
cheap relish now and then. Thus four shillings a week is made to cover
food, and three shillings gives her a small back room. For such lights,
fire, and washing as cannot be dispensed with, must be counted another
shilling. Out of the remaining two shillings must come her twopence a
week, if she belongs to any trades-union, leaving one shilling and
ten-pence for clothes, holidays, amusements, saving, and the possible
doctor's bill, a sum for the year, at the utmost, of from four pounds
fifteen shillings and ninepence, or a trifle under twenty dollars. These
women are, every one of them, past-mistresses in the art of doing
without; and they do without with a patient courage, and often a
cheerfulness, that is one of the most pathetic facts in their story. It
is the established order of things. Why should they cry or make ado?
Yet, as the workshop has its own education for men, and gives us the
order known as the "intelligent workman," so it gives us also the no
less intelligent workwoman, possessing not only the natural womanly gift
of many resources, but the added power of just so much technical
training as she may have received in her apprenticeship to her trade.

Miss Simcox, who has made a study of the whole question, comments on
this, in an admirable article in one of the monthlies for 1887,
emphasizing the fact that these women, fitted by experience and long
training for larger work, must live permanently, with absolutely no
outlook or chance of change, on the border-land of poverty and want.
They know all the needs, all the failings of their own class. Many of
them give time, after the long day's work is done, to attempts at
organizing and to general missionary work among their order; and by such
efforts the few and feeble unions among them have been kept alive. But
vital statistics show what the end is where such double labor must be
performed. These women who have character and intelligence, and
unselfish desire to work for others, have an average "expectation of
life" less by twenty years than that of the class who know the
comfortable ease of middle-class life.

It is one of these workers who said not long ago, her words being put
into the mouth of one of Mr. Besant's characters: "Ladies deliberately
shut their eyes; they won't take trouble; they won't think; they like
things about them to look smooth and comfortable; they will get things
cheap if they can. _What do they care if the cheapness is got by
starving women?_ Who is killing this girl here? Bad food and hard work.
Cheapness! What do the ladies care how many working girls are killed?"

The individual woman brought face to face with the woman dying from
overwork, would undoubtedly care. But the workers are out of sight,
hidden away in attic and basement, or the upper rooms of great
manufactories. The bargains are plain to see, every counter loaded,
every window filled. And so society, which will have its bargains, is
practically in a conspiracy against the worker. The woman who spends on
her cheapest dress the utmost sum which her working sister has for
dress, amusements, culture, and saving, preaches thrift, and it is
certain the working classes would be better off if they had learned to
save. Small wonder that the workers doubt them and their professed
friendship, and that the breach widens day by day between classes and
masses, bridged only by the work of those who, like the workers in the
Women's Provident League, know that it is to the rich that the need for
industry must be preached, not to the poor. Organization holds education
for both, and it is now quite possible to know something of the methods
of prominent firms with their workwomen, and to shun those which refuse
to consider the questions of over-time, of unsanitary workrooms, of
unjust fines and reductions, and the thousand ways of emptying some
portion of the workwoman's purse into that of the employer. It is women
who must do this, and till it is done, justice is mute, and the voice of
our sisters' blood cries aloud from the ground.




CHAPTER IX.

THE TALE OF A BARROW.


If the West End knows not the East End, save as philanthropy and Mr.
Walter Besant have compelled it, much less does it know Leather Lane, a
remnant of old London, now given over chiefly to Italians, and thus a
little more picturesquely dirty than in its primal state of pure English
grime. The eager business man hurrying down "that part of Holborn
christened High," is as little aware of the neighborhood of Leather Lane
and what it stands for, as the New Yorker on Broadway is of Mulberry
Street and the Great Bend. For either or both, entrance is entrance into
a world quite unknown to decorous respectability, and, if one looks
aright, as full of wonders and discoveries as other unknown countries
under our feet. Out of Leather Lane, with its ancient houses swarming
with inhabitants and in all stages of decay and foulness, open other
lanes as unsavory, through which the costers drive their barrows,
chaffering with dishevelled women, who bear a black eye or other token
that the British husband has been exercising his rights, and who find
bargaining for a bunch of turnips or a head of cabbage an exhilarating
change.

There were many costers and many barrows, but among them all hardly one
so popular as "old Widgeon," who had been in the business forty years;
and as he had chosen to remain a bachelor, an absolutely unheard-of
state of things, he was an object of deepest interest to every woman in
Leather Lane and its purlieus. It was always possible that he might
change his mind; and from the oldest inhabitant down to the child just
beginning to ask questions, there was always a sense of expectation
where Widgeon was concerned. He, in the meantime, did his day's work
contentedly, had a quick eye for all trouble, and in such cases was sure
to give overweight, or even to let the heavy penny or two fall
accidentally into the purchase. His donkey had something the same
expression of patient good-humored receptivity. The children climbed
over the barrow and even on the donkey's back, and though Widgeon made
great feint of driving them off with a very stubby whip, they knew well
that it would always just miss them, and returned day after day
undismayed. He "did for himself" in a garret in a dark little house, up
a darker court; and here it was popularly supposed he had hidden the
gains of all these forty years. They might be there or in the donkey's
stable, but they were somewhere, and then came the question, who would
have them when he died?

To these speculations Nan listened silently, in the pauses of the
machines on which her mother and three other women stitched trousers.
Nothing was expected of her but to mind the baby, to see that the fire
kept in, just smouldering, and that there was always hot water enough
for the tea. On the days when they all stitched she fared well enough;
but when she had carried home the work, and received the money, there
was a day, sometimes two or three, in which gin ruled, and the women
first shouted and sang songs, and at last lay about the floor in every
stage of drunkenness. Gradually chances for work slipped away; the
machines were given up, and the partnership of workers dissolved, and at
twelve, Nan and the baby were beggars and the mother in prison for
aggravated assault on a neighbor. She died there, and thus settled one
problem, and now came the other, how was Nan to live?

Old Widgeon answered this question. They had always been good friends
from the day he had seen her standing, holding the baby, crippled and
hopelessly deformed from its birth. His barrow was almost empty, and the
donkey pointing his long ears toward the stable.

"Get in," he said, "an' I'll give you a bit of a ride," and Nan,
speechless with joy, climbed in and was driven to the stable, and once
there, watched the unharnessing and received some stray oranges as she
finally turned away. From that day old Widgeon became her patron saint.
She had shot up into a tall girl, shrinking from those about her, and
absorbed chiefly in the crooked little figure, still "the baby;" but
tall as she might be, she was barely twelve, and how should she hire a
machine and pay room rent and live?

Widgeon settled all that.

"You know how to stitch away at them trousers?" he had said, and Nan
nodded.

"Then I'll see you through the first week or two," he said; "but, mind!
don't you whisper it, or I'll 'ave hevery distressed female in the court
down on me, and there's enough hof 'em now."

Nan nodded again, but he saw the tears in her eyes, and regarded words
as quite unnecessary. The sweater asked no questions when she came for a
bundle of work, nor did she tell him that she alone was now responsible.
She had learned to stitch. Skill came with practice, and she might as
well have such slight advantage as arose from being her mother's
messenger.

So Nan's independent life began, and so it went on. She grew no taller,
but did grow older, her silent gravity making her seem older still. It
was hard work. She had never liked tea, and she loathed the sight and
smell of either beer or spirits, old experience having made them
hateful. Thus she had none of the nervous stimulant which keeps up the
ordinary worker, and with small knowledge of any cookery but boiling
potatoes and turnips, and frying bacon or sprats, fared worse than her
companions. But she had learned to live on very little. She stitched
steadily all day and every day, gaining more and more skill, but never
able to earn more than fourteen shillings a week. Prices went down
steadily. At fourteen shillings she could live, and had managed even not
only to pay Widgeon but to pick up some "bits of things." She was like
her father, the old people in the alley said. He had been a silent,
decent, hard-working man, who died broken-hearted at the turn his wife
took for drink. Nan had his patience and his faithfulness; and Johnny,
who crawled about the room, and could light a fire and do some odds and
ends of house-keeping, was like her, and saved her much time as he grew
older, but hardly any bigger. He had even learned to fry sprats, and to
sing, in a high, cracked, little voice, a song known throughout the
alley:--


     "Oh, 'tis my delight of a Friday night,
       When sprats they isn't dear,
     To fry a couple o' dozen or so
       Upon a fire clear."


There are many verses of this ditty, all ending with the chorus:--


     "Oh, 'tis my delight of a Friday night!"


and Johnny varied the facts ingeniously, and shouted "bacon," or
anything else that would fry, well pleased at his own ingenuity.

"He was 'wanting.' Nan might better put him away in some asylum," the
neighbors said; but Nan paid no attention. He was all she had, and he
was much better worth working for than herself, and so she went on.

Old Widgeon had been spending the evening with them. Nan had stitched on
as she must; for prices had gone down again, and she was earning but
nine shillings a week. Widgeon seldom said much. He held Johnny on his
knee, and now and then looked at Nan.

"It's a dog's life," he said at last. "It's far worse than a dog's.
You'd be better off going with a barrow, Nan. I'm a good mind to leave
you mine, Nan. You'd get a bit of air, then, and you'd make--well, a
good bit more than you do now."

Widgeon had checked himself suddenly. Nobody knew what the weekly gain
might be, but people put it as high as three pounds; and this was
fabulous wealth.

"I've thought of it," Nan said. "I've thought of it ever since that day
you rode me and Johnny in the barrow. Do you mind? The donkey knows me
now, I think. He's a wise one."

"Ay, he's a wise one," the old man said. "Donkeys is wiser than folks
think." He put Johnny down suddenly, and sat looking at him strangely;
but Nan did not see. The machine whirred on, but it stopped suddenly as
Johnny cried out. Widgeon had slipped silently from his chair; his eyes
were open, but he did not seem to see her, and he was breathing heavily.
Nan ran into the passage and called an old neighbor, and the two
together, using all their strength, managed to get him to the bed.

"It's a stroke," the woman said. "Lord love you, what'll you do? He
can't stay here. He'd better be sent to 'ospital."

"I'll be 'anged first," said old Widgeon, who had opened his eyes
suddenly and looked at them both. "I was a bit queer, but I'm right
enough now. Who talks about 'ospitals?"

He tried to move and his face changed.

"I'm a bit queer yet," he said, "but it'll pass; it'll pass. Nan, you'll
not mind my being in your way for a night. There's money in me pocket.
Maybe there's another room to be 'ad."

"There's a bit of a one off me own that was me John's, an' him only gone
yesterday," said the woman eagerly; "an' a bed an' all, an' openin'
right off of this. The door's behind that press. It's one with this, an'
the two belongs together, an' for two an' six a week without, an' three
an' six with all that's in it, it's for anybody that wants it."

"I'll take it a week," said old Widgeon, "but I'll not want the use of
it more than this night. I'm a bit queer now, but it'll pass; it'll
pass."

The week went, but old Widgeon was still "a bit queer;" and the doctor,
who was at last called in, said that he was likely to remain so. One
side was paralyzed. It might lessen, but would never recover entirely.
He would have to be looked out for. This was his daughter? She must
understand that he needed care, and would not be able to work any more.

Old Widgeon heard him in silence, and then turned his face to the wall,
and for hours made no sign. When he spoke at last, it was in his usual
tone.

"I thought to end my days in the free air," he said, "but that ain't to
be. And I'm thinking the stroke's come to do you a good turn, Nan.
There's the donkey and the barrow, and everybody knowing it as well as
they know me. I'll send you to my man in Covent Garden. He's a fair 'un.
He don't cheat. He'll do well by you, an' you shall drive the barrow and
see what you make of it. We'll be partners, Nan. You look out for me a
bit, an' I'll teach you the business and 'ave an heye to Johnny. What do
you say? Will you try it? It'll break me 'art if that donkey and barrow
goes to hanybody that'll make light of 'em hand habuse 'em. There hain't
such another donkey and barrow in all London, and you're one that knows
it, Nan."

"Yes, I know it," Nan said. "You ought to know, if you think I could do
it."

"There's nought that can't be done if you sets your mind well to it,"
said old Widgeon. "And now, Nan, 'ere's the key, and you get Billy just
by the stable there to move my bits o' things over here. That court's no
place for you, an' there's more light here. Billy's a good 'un. He'll
'elp you when you need it."

This is the story of the fresh-faced, serious young woman who drives a
donkey-barrow through certain quiet streets in northwest London, and has
a regular line of customers, who find her wares, straight from Covent
Garden, exactly what she represents. Health and strength have come with
the new work, and though it has its hardships, they are as nothing
compared with the deadly, monotonous labor at the machine. Johnny, too,
shares the benefit, and holds the reins or makes change, at least once
or twice a week, while old Widgeon, a little more helpless, but
otherwise the same, regards his "stroke" as a providential interposition
on Nan's behalf, and Nan herself as better than any daughter.

"I've all the good of a child, and none o' the hups hand downs o' the
married state," he chuckles; "hand so, whathever you think, I'm lucky to
the hend."




CHAPTER X.

STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN.


"With hall the click there is to a woman's tongue you'd think she could
'patter' with the best of the men, but, Lor' bless you! a woman can't
'patter' any more'n she can make a coat, or sweep a chimley. And why she
can't beats me, and neither I nor nobody knows."

"To patter" is a verb conjugated daily by the street seller of any
pretensions. The coster needs less of it than most vendors, his wares
speaking for themselves; but the general seller of small-wares,
bootlaces, toys, children's books, and what not, must have a natural
gift, or acquire it as fast as possible. To patter is to rattle off with
incredible swiftness and fluency, not only recommendations of the goods
themselves, but any side thoughts that occur; and often a street-seller
is practically a humorous lecturer, a student of men and morals, and
gives the result in shrewd sentences well worth listening to. Half a
dozen derivations are assigned to the word, one being that it comes from
the rattled off _paternosters_ of the devout but hasty Catholic, who
says as many as possible in a given space of time. Be this as it may, it
is quite true that pattering is an essential feature of any specially
successful street-calling, and equally true that no woman has yet
appeared who possesses the gift.

In spite of this nearly fatal deficiency, innumerable women pursue
street trades, and, notwithstanding exposure and privation and the
scantiest of earnings, have every advantage over their sisters of the
needle. Rheumatism, born of bad diet and the penetrating rawness and
fogs of eight months of the English year, is their chief enemy; but as a
whole they are a strong, hardy, and healthy set of workers, who shudder
at the thought of bending all day over machine or needle, and thank the
fate that first turned them toward a street-calling. So conservative,
however, is working England, that the needlewoman, even at starvation
point, feels herself superior to a street-seller; and the latter is
quite conscious of this feeling, and resents it accordingly. With many
the adoption of such employment is the result of accident, and the women
in it divide naturally into four classes: (1) The wives of
street-sellers; (2) Mechanics, or laborers' wives who go out
street-selling while their husbands are at work, in order to swell the
family income; (3) The widows of former street-sellers; (4) Single
women.

Trades that necessitate pushing a heavy barrow, and, indeed, most of
those involving the carrying of heavy weights, are in the hands of men,
and also the more skilled trades, such as the selling of books or
stationery,--in short, the business in which patter is demanded.
Occasionally there is a partnership, and man and wife carry on the same
trade, she aiding him with his barrow, but for the most part they choose
different occupations. In the case of one man in Whitechapel who worked
for a sweater; the wife sold water-cresses morning and evening, while
the wife of a bobbin turner had taken to small-wares, shoe-laces, etc.
as a help. Both tailor and turner declared that, if things went on as
they were at present, they should take to the streets also; for earnings
were less and less, and they were "treated like dirt, and worse."

The women whose trades have been noted are dealers in fish, shrimps, and
winkles, and sometimes oysters, fruit, and vegetables,--fruit
predominating, orange-women and girls being as much a feature of London
street life as in the days of pretty Nelly Gwynne. Sheep-trotters, too,
are given over to women, with rice-milk, which is a favorite
street-dainty, requiring a good deal of preparation; they sell curds and
whey, and now and then, though very seldom, they have a coffee or
elder-wine stand, the latter being sold hot and spiced, as a preventive
of rheumatism and chill. To these sales they add fire-screens and
ornaments (the English grate in summer being filled with every order of
paper ornamentation), laces, millinery, cut flowers, boot and corset
laces, and small-wares of every description, including wash-leathers,
dressed and undressed dolls, and every variety of knitted articles,
mittens, cuffs, socks, etc.

It will be seen that the range in street trades is far wider for the
English than for the American woman, to whom it would almost never occur
as a possible means of livelihood. But London holds several thousands of
these women, a large proportion Irish, it is true, with a mixture of
other nationalities, but English still predominating. The Irishwoman is
more fluent, and can even patter in slight degree, but has less
intelligence, and confines herself to the lower order of trades. For
both Irish and English there is the same deep-seated horror of the
workhouse. All winter a young Irishwoman has sat at the corner of a
little street opening from the Commercial Road, a basket of apples at
her side, and her thin garments no protection against the fearful chill
of fog and mist. She had come to London, hoping to find a brother and go
over with him to America; but no trace of him could be discovered, and
so she borrowed a shilling and became an apple-seller.

"God knows," she said, "I'd be betther off in the house [workhouse], for
it's half dead I am entirely; but I'd rather live on twopence a day than
come to that."

Practically she was living on very little more. An aunt, also a
street-seller, had taken her in. She rented a small room near by, for
which they paid two shillings a week, their whole expenses averaging
sixpence each a day. Naturally they were half starved; but they
preferred this to "the house," and no one who has examined these
retreats can blame them.

It is the poor who chiefly patronize these street-sellers, and they
swarm where the poor are massed. The "Borough," on the Surrey side of
the river, with its innumerable little streets and lanes, each more
wretched than the last, has hundreds of them, no less than the
better-known East End. Leather Lane, one of the most crowded and
distinctive of the quarters of the poor, though comparatively little
known, has also its network of alleys and courts opening from it, and is
one of the most crowded markets in the city, rivalling even Petticoat
Lane. The latter, whose time-honored name has foolishly been changed to
Middlesex Street, is an old-clothes market, and presents one of the most
extraordinary sights in London; but the trade is chiefly in the hands
of men, though their wives usually act as assistants and determine the
quality of a garment till the masculine sense has been educated up to
the proper point. Any very small, very old, and very dirty street at any
point has its proportion of street-sellers, whose dark, grimy,
comfortless rooms are their refuge at night. Other rooms of a better
order are occupied, it may be, by some relative or child to be
supported; and higher still rank those that are counted homes, where
husband and wife meet when the day's work is done.

Like the needlewomen, the diet of the majority is meagre and poor to a
degree. The Irishwoman is much more ready to try to make the meal hot
and relishable than the Englishwoman, though even she confines herself
to cheap fish and potatoes, herring or plaice at two a penny.

A quiet, very respectable looking woman, the widow of a coster, sold
cakes of blacking and small-wares, and gave her view of this phase of
the question.

"It's cheaper, their way of doing. Oh, yes, but not so livening. I could
live cheaper on fish and potatoes than tea and bread and butter; but
that ain't it. They're more trouble, an' when you've been on your legs
all day, an' get to your bit of a home for a cup of tea, you want a bit
of rest, and you can't be cooking and fussing with fish. There's always
a neighbor to give you a jug of boiling water, if you've no time for
fire, or it's summer, and tea livens you up a bit where a herring won't.
I take mine without milk, and like it better without, and often I don't
have butter on me bread. But I get along, and, please God, I'll be able
to keep out of the 'house' to the end."

The married women fare better. The men decline to be put off with bread
and tea, and the cook-shops and cheap markets help them to what they
call good living. They buy "good block ornaments," that is, small pieces
of meat, discolored but not dirty nor tainted, which are set out for
sale on the butcher's block. Tripe and cowheel are regarded as dainties,
and there is the whole range of mysterious English preparations of
questionable meat, from sausage and polonies to saveloys and cheap pies.
Soup can be had, pea or eel, at two or three pence a pint, and beer, an
essential to most of them, is "threepence a pot [quart] in your own
jugs." A savory dinner or supper is, therefore, an easy matter, and the
English worker fares better in this respect than the American, for whom
there is much less provision in the way of cheap food and cook-shops. In
fact the last are almost unknown with us, the cheap restaurant by no
means taking their place. Even with bread and tea alone, there is a good
deal more nourishment, since English bread is never allowed to rise to
the over-lightness which appears an essential to the American buyer. The
law with English breads and cakes of whatever nature appears to be to
work in all the flour the dough can hold, and pudding must be a slab,
and bread compact and dense to satisfy the English palate. Dripping is
the substitute for butter, and the children eat the slice of bread and
dripping contentedly. Fat of any sort is in demand, the piercing rawness
of an English winter seeming to call for heating food no less than that
of the Esquimaux for its rations of blubber and tallow. But the majority
of the women leave dripping for the children, and if a scrap of butter
cannot be had, rest contented with bread and tea, and an occasional pint
of beer. For workingwomen as a class, however, there is much less
indulgence in this than is supposed. To the men it is as essential as
the daily meals, and the women regard it in the same way. "We do well
enough with our tea, but a man must have his pint," they say; and this
principle is applied to the children, the girls standing by while the
boys take their turn at the "pot of mild."

This for the best order of workers. Below this line are all grades of
indulgence ending with the woman who earns just enough for the measure
of gin that will give her a day or an hour of unconsciousness and
freedom from any human claim. But the pressure of numbers and of
competing workers compels soberness, the steadiest and most capable
being barely able to secure subsistence, while below them is every
conceivable phase of want and struggle, more sharply defined and with
less possibility of remedy than anything found in the approximate
conditions on American soil.




CHAPTER XI.

LONDON SHOP-GIRLS.


"It's the ladies that's in the way, mum. Once get a lady to think that a
girl isn't idling because she's sitting down, and the battle's won. But
a lady comes into a shop blacker 'n midnight if every soul in it isn't
on their feet and springing to serve her. I've got seats, but, bless
you! my trade 'd be ruined if the girls used them much. 'Tisn't that I'm
not willing, and me brother as well. It's the customers, the lady
customers, that wouldn't stand it. Its them that you've got to talk to."

Once more it is a woman who is apparently woman's worst enemy, and
London sins far more heavily in this respect than New York, and for a
very obvious reason, that of sharply defined lines of caste, and the
necessity of emphasizing them felt by all whose position does not speak
for itself. A "born lady" on entering a shop where women clerks were
sitting, might realize that from eleven to fourteen hours' service daily
might well be punctuated by a few moments on the bits of board pushed in
between boxes, which do duty for seats, and be glad that an opportunity
had been improved. Not so the wife of the prosperous butcher or baker or
candlestick maker, rejoicing, it may be, in the first appearance in
plush and silk, and bent upon making it as impressive as possible. To
her, obsequiousness is the first essential of any dealing with the order
from which she is emerging; and her custom will go to the shop where its
outward tokens are most profuse. A clerk found sitting is simply
embodied impertinence, and the floor manager who allows it an offender
against every law of propriety; and thus it happens that seats are
slipped out of sight, and exhausted women smile and ask, as the purchase
is made, "And what is the next pleasure?" in a tone that makes the
American hearer cringe for the abject humility that is the first
condition of success as seller.

Even the best shops are not exempt from this, and as one passes from
west to east the ratio increases, culminating in the oily glibness of
the bargain-loving Jew, and his no less bargain-loving London brother of
Whitechapel, or any other district unknown to fashion.

This, however, is a merely outward phase. The actual wrongs of the
system lie deeper, but are soon as apparent. For the shop-girl, as for
the needlewoman or general worker of any description whatsoever,
over-time is the standing difficulty, and a grievance almost impossible
to redress. That an act of parliament forbids the employment of any
young person under eighteen more than eleven hours a day, makes small
difference. Inspectors cannot be everywhere at once, and violations are
the rule. In fact, the law is a dead letter, and the employer who finds
himself suddenly arraigned for violation is as indignant as if no
responsibility rested upon him. A committee has for many months been
doing self-elected work in this direction, registering the names of
shops where over-hours are demanded, informing the clerks of the law
and its bearings, and urging them to make formal complaint. The same
difficulty confronts them here as in the attempts to reduce over-time
for tailoresses and general needlewomen--the fear of the workers
themselves that any complaint will involve the losing of the situation;
and thus silent submission is the rule for all, any revolt bringing upon
them instant discharge.

In a prolonged inquiry into the condition of shop-girls in both the West
and East End, the needs to be met first of all summed themselves up in
four: (1) more seats and far more liberty in the use of them; (2) better
arrangements for midday dinner--on the premises if possible, the girls
now losing much of the hour in a hurried rush to the nearest
eatinghouse; (3) with this, some regularity as to time for dinner, this
being left at present to the caprice of the manager, who both delays and
shortens time; (4) much greater care in the selection of managers. A
fifth point might well be added, that of a free afternoon each week.
This has been given by a few London firms, and has worked well in the
added efficiency and interest of the girls, but by the majority, is
regarded as a wild and very useless innovation.

The first point is often considered as settled, yet for both sides of
the sea is actually in much the same case. Seats are kept out of sight,
and for the majority of both sellers and buyers, there is the smallest
comprehension of the strain of continuous standing, or its final effect.
It is the popular conviction that women "get used to it," and to a
certain extent this is true, the strong and robust adjusting themselves
to the conditions required. But the majority must spend the larger
portion of the week's earnings on the neat clothing required by the
position, and to accomplish this they go underfed to a degree that is
half starvation. It is this latter division of shop girls who suffer,
not only from varicose veins brought on by long standing, but from many
other diseases, the result of the same cause; yet, till women, who come
as purchasers to the shops where women are employed, realize and
remember this, reform under this head is practically impossible. The
employer knows that, even if a few protest against the custom, his trade
would suffer were it done away with; and thus buyer and seller form a
combination against which revolt is impossible.

The inquiry brought one fact to light, which, so far as I know, has as
yet no counterpart in the United States, and this is, that in certain
West End shops every girl must conform to a uniform size of waist, this
varying from eighteen to twenty inches, but never above twenty. Tall or
short, fat or lean, Nature must stand aside, and the hour-glass serve as
model, the results simply adding one more factor of destruction to the
number already ranged against the girl.

The matter of regular meals has also far less attention than is
necessary. Dinner is a "movable feast." The girls are allowed to go out
only two or three at once, and often it is three o'clock or even later
before some have broken the fast. Though there is often ample room for
tea and coffee urns, the suggestion seems to be regarded as a dangerous
innovation, holding under the innocent seeming, a possible social
revolution. The thing that hath been shall be, and the obstinate
hide-bound conservatism of the English shop-keeper is beyond belief
till experience has made it certain. A few employers consider this
matter. The majority ignore it as beneath consideration.

The question of suitable floor managers is really the comprehensive one,
including almost every evil and every good that can come to the shop
girl, whether in the East or West End. Here, as with us, the girl is
absolutely in his power. He governs the whole system of fines, one
uncomfortable but necessary feature of any large establishment, and
injustice in these can have fullest possible play.

"The fines are an awful nuisance, that they are," said a bright-faced
girl in one of the best-known shops of London--a great bazar, much like
Macy's. "But then it all depends on the manager. Some of them are real
nasty, you know, and if they happen not to like a girl, they stick on
fines just to spite her. You see we're in their power, and some of them
just love to show it and bully the girls no end. And worse than that,
they're impudent too if a girl is pretty, and often she doesn't dare
complain, for fear of losing the place, and he has it all his own way.
This department's got a very fair manager, and we all like him. He's
careful about fines, and plans about our dinners and all that, so we're
better off than most. The manager does what he pleases everywhere."

These facts are for the West End, where dealings are nominally fair, and
where wages may, in some exceptional case, run as high as eighteen
shillings or even a pound a week. But the average falls far below this,
from ten to fourteen being the usual figures, while seven and eight may
be the sum. This, for the girl who lives at home, represents dress and
pocket-money, but the great majority must support themselves entirely.
We have already seen what this sum can do for the shirt-maker and
general needlewoman, and it is easy to judge how the girl fares for whom
the weekly wage is less. In the East End it falls sometimes as low as
three shillings and sixpence (84c.). The girls club together, huddling
in small back rooms, and spending all that can be saved on dress.
Naturally, unless with exceptionally keen consciences, they find what is
called "sin" an easier fact than starvation; and so the story goes on,
and out of greed is born the misery, which, at last, compels greed to
heavier poor rates, and thus an approximation to the distribution of the
profit which should have been the worker's.

Here, as in all cities, the place seems to beckon every girl ambitious
of something beyond domestic service. There are cheap amusements,
"penny-gaffs" and the like, the "penny-gaff" being the equivalent of our
dime museum. There is the companionship of the fellow-worker; the late
going home through brightly-lighted streets, and the crowding throng of
people,--all that makes the alleviation of the East End life; and there
is, too, the chance, always possible, of a lover and a husband, perhaps
a grade above, or many grades above, their beginning or their present
lives. This alone is impulse and hope. It is much the same story for
both sides of the sea; and here, as in most cases where woman's work is
involved, it is with women that any change lies, and from their efforts
that something better must come.




CHAPTER XII.

FROM COVENT GARDEN TO THE EEL-SOUP MAN IN THE BOROUGH.


Now and then, in the long search into the underlying causes of effects
which are plain to all men's eyes, one pauses till the rush of
impressions has ceased, and it is possible again to ignore this
many-sided, demanding London, which makes a claim unknown to any other
city of the earth save Rome. But there is a certain justification in
lingering at points where women and children congregate, since their
life also is part of the quest, and nowhere can it better be seen than
in and about Covent Garden Market,--a thousand thoughts arising as the
old square is entered from whatever point.

It is not alone the first days of the pilgrim's wanderings in London
that are filled with the curious sense of home coming that makes up the
consciousness of many an American. It is as if an old story were told
again, and the heir, stolen in childhood, returned, unrecognized by
those about him, but recalling with more and more freshness and
certainty the scenes of which he was once a part. The years slip away.
Two hundred and more of them lie between, it is true; but not two
hundred nor ten times two hundred can blot out the lines of a record in
which the struggle and the hope of all English-speaking people was one.
For past or present alike, London stands as the fountain-head; and thus,
whatever pain may come from the oppressive sense of crowded, swarming
life pent up in these dull gray walls, whatever conviction that such a
monster mass of human energy and human pain needs diffusion and not
concentration, London holds and will hold a fascination that is quite
apart from any outward aspect.

To go to a point determined upon beforehand is good. To lose oneself in
the labyrinth of lanes and alleys and come suddenly upon something quite
as desirable, is even better; and this losing is as inevitable as the
finding also becomes. The first perplexity arises from the fact that a
London street is "everything by turns and nothing long," and that a
solitary block of buildings owns often a name as long as itself. The
line of street which, on the map, appears continuous, gives a dozen
changes to the mile, and the pilgrim discovers quickly that he is always
somewhere else than at or on the point determined upon. Then the
temptation to add to this complication by sudden excursions into shadowy
courts and dark little passages is irresistible, not to mention the
desire, equally pressing, of discovering at once if Violet Lane and Hop
Vine Alley and Myrtle Court have really any relation to their names, or
are simply the reaching out of their inhabitants for some touch of
Nature's benefactions. Violet Lane may have had its hedgerows and
violets in a day long dead, precisely as hop vines may have flung their
pale green bells over cottage paling, for both are far outside the old
city limits; but to-day they are simply the narrowest of passages
between the grimiest of buildings, given over to trade in its most
sordid form, with never a green leaf even to recall the country
hedgerows long since only memory.

It is a matter of no surprise, then, to find that Covent Garden holds no
hint of its past save in name, though from the noisy Strand one has
passed into so many sheltered, quiet nooks unknown to nine tenths of the
hurrying throng in that great artery of London, that one half expects to
see the green trees and the box-bordered alleys of the old garden where
the monks once walked. Far back in the very beginning of the thirteenth
century it was the convent garden of Westminster, and its choice fruits
and flowers rejoiced the soul of the growers, who planted and pruned
with small thought of what the centuries were to bring. Through all
chances and changes it remained a garden up to 1621, when much of the
original ground had been swallowed up by royal grants, and one duke and
another had built his town-house amid the spreading trees; for this
"amorous and herbivorous parish," as Sidney Smith calls it, was one of
the most fashionable quarters of London. The Stuart kings and their
courts delighted in it, and the square was filled with houses designed
by Inigo Jones, the north and east side of the market having an arcade
called the "Portico Walk," but soon changed to the name which it has
long borne,--the "Piazza." The market went on behind these pillars, but
year by year, as London grew, pushed itself toward the centre of the
square, till now not a foot of vacant space remains. At one of its
stalls may still be found an ancient marketman, whose name, Anthony
Piazza, is a memory of a parish custom which named after this favorite
walk many of the foundling children born in the parish.

There is nothing more curious in all London than the transformations
known to this once quiet spot. Drury Lane is close at hand, and Covent
Garden Theatre is as well known as the market itself. The convent has
become a play-house. "Monks and nuns turn actors and actresses. The
garden, formal and quiet, where a salad was cut for a lady abbess, and
flowers were gathered to adorn images, becomes a market, noisy and full
of life, distributing its thousands of fruits and flowers to a vicious
metropolis." Two quaint old inns are still here; two great national
theatres, and a churchyard full of mouldy but still famous
celebrities,--the church itself, bare and big, rising above them. In the
days of the Stuarts, people prayed to be buried here hardly less than in
Westminster Abbey, and the lover of epitaph and monument will find
occupation for many an hour. This strange, squat old building, under the
shadow of the church, is the market, its hundred columns and
chapel-looking fronts always knee-deep and more in baskets and fruits
and vegetables, while its air still seems to breathe of old books, old
painters, and old authors.

"Night and morning are at meeting," for Covent Garden makes small
distinction between the two, and whether it is a late supper or an early
breakfast that the coffee-rooms and stalls are furnishing, can hardly be
determined by one who has elected to know how the market receives and
how it distributes its supplies. In November fog and mist, or the
blackness of early winter, with snow on the ground, or cold rain
falling, resolution is needed for such an expedition, and still more,
if one would see all that the deep night hides, and that comes to light
as the dawn struggles through. This business of feeding a city of four
million people seems the simplest and most natural of occupations; but
the facts involved are staggering, not alone in the mere matter of
quantities and the amazement at the first sight of them, but in the
thousands of lives tangled with them. Quantity is the first impression.
Every cellar runs over with green stuff, mountains of which come in on
enormous wagons and fill up all spaces left vacant, heaving masses of
basket stumbling from other wagons and filling with instant celerity. In
the great vans pour, from every market garden and outlying district of
London, from all England, from the United Kingdom, from all the world,
literally; for it is soon discovered that these enormous vehicles on
high springs and with immense wheels, drawn by Normandy horses of size
and strength to match, are chiefly from the railway stations, and that
the drivers, who seem to be built on the same plan as the horses and
vans, have big limbs and big voices and a high color, and that the
bulging pockets of their velveteen suits show invoices and receipt
books.

Not alone from railway stations and trains, from which tons of cabbages,
carrots, onions, and all the vegetable tribe issue, but from the docks
where steamers from Rotterdam and Antwerp and India and America, and all
that lie between, come the contributions, ranged presently in due order
in stall and arcade. There is no hint of anything grosser than the great
cabbages, which appear to be London's favorite vegetable. Meat has its
place at Smithfield, and fish at Billingsgate, but the old garden is, in
one sense, true to its name, and gives us only the kindly fruits of the
earth, with their transformations into butter and cheese.

In the central arcade fruit has the honors, and no prettier picture can
well be imagined. For once under these gray skies there is a sense of
color and light, and there is no surprise in hearing that Turner came
here to study both, and that even the artist of to-day does not disdain
the same method.

It is the flower-market, however, to which one turns with a certainty
gained at once that no disappointment follows intimate acquaintance
with English flowers. There are exotics for those who will, but it is
not with them that one lingers. It is to the hundreds upon hundreds of
flower-pots, in which grow roses and geraniums and mignonette and a
score with old-fashioned but forever beloved names. There are great
bunches of mignonette for a penny, and lesser bunches of sweet odors for
the same coin, while the violets have rows of baskets to themselves, as
indeed they need, for scores of buyers flock about them,--little buyers
chiefly, with tangled hair and bare feet and the purchase-money tied in
some corner of their rags; for they buy to sell again, and having
tramped miles it may be to this fountain-head, will tramp other miles
before night comes, making their way into court and alley and under
sunless doorways, crying "Violets! sweet violets!" as they were cried in
Herrick's time. A ha'penny will buy one of the tiny bunches which they
have made up with swift fingers, and they are bought even by the
poorest; how, heaven only knows. But, in cracked jug or battered tin,
the bunch of violets sweetens the foul air, or the bit of mignonette
grows and even thrives, where human kind cannot.

So, though Covent Garden has in winter "flowers at guineas apiece,
pineapples at guineas a pound, and peas at guineas a quart,"--these for
the rich only,--it has also its possibilities for the poor. They throng
about it at all times, for there is always a chance of some stray orange
or apple or rejected vegetable that will help out a meal. They throng
above all in these terrible days when the "unemployed" are huddling
under arches and in dark places where they lay their homeless heads, and
where, in the hours between night and morning, the cocoa-rooms open for
the hungry drivers of the big vans, who pour down great mugs of coffee
and cocoa, and make away with mountains of bread and butter. A penny
gives a small mug of cocoa and a slice of bread and butter, and the
owner of a penny is rich. Often it is shared, and the sharer, half drunk
still, it may be, and foul with the mud and refuse into which he
crawled, can hardly be known as human, save for this one gleam of
something beyond the human. Gaunt forms barely covered with rags,
hollow eyes fierce with hunger, meet one at every turn in this early
morning; and for many there is not even the penny, and they wait,
sometimes with appeal, but as often silently, the chance gift of the
buyer. Food for all the world, it would seem, and yet London is not fed;
and having once looked upon these waifs that are floated against the
pillars of the old market, one fancies almost a curse on the piles of
food that is not for them save as charity gives it, and the flowers that
even on graves will never be theirs.

Men and women huddle here, and under the arches, children skulk away
like young rats, feeding on offal, lying close in dark corners for
warmth, and hunted about also like rats. It is a poverty desperate and
horrible beyond that that any other civilized city can show; and who
shall say who is responsible, or what the end will be?

So the question lingers with one, as the market is left, and one passes
on and out to the Strand and its motley stream of life, lingering
through Fleet Street and the winding ways into the City, past St.
Paul's, and still on till London Bridge is reached and the Borough is
near. Fare as one may, north or south, west or east, there is no escape
from the sullen roar of the great city, a roar like the beat of a stormy
sea against cliffs. An hour and more ago, that perplexed and baffled
luminary the sun has struggled up through strange shapes and hues of
morning cloud, and for a few minutes asserted his right to rule. But the
gleam of gold and crimson brought with him has given way to the grays
and black which make up chiefly what the Londoners call sky, and over
London Bridge one passes on into the dim grayness merging into something
darker and more cheerless. On the Borough Road there should be some
escape,--that Borough Road on which the Canterbury Pilgrims rode out on
a morning less complicated, it is certain, by fog and mist and smoke and
soot than mornings that dawn for this generation. Every foot of the way
is history; the old Tower at one's back, and the past as alive as the
present. "Merrie England" was at its best, they say, when the pages we
know were making; but here as elsewhere, the name is a tradition,
belied by every fact of the present.

The old inns along the way still hold their promise of good cheer, and
the great kitchens and tap-rooms have seen wild revelry enough; but even
for them has been the sight of political or other martyr done to death
in their court-yards, while no foot of playground, no matter how much
the people's own, but has been steeped in blood and watered with tears
of English matron and maid. If "Merrie England" deserved its name, it
must have come from a determination as fixed as Mark Tapley's, to be
jolly under any and all circumstances, and certainly circumstances have
done their best to favor such resolution. The peasant of the past,
usually represented as dancing heavily about a Maypole, or gazing
contentedly at some procession of his lords and masters as it swept by,
has no counterpart to-day, nor will his like come again. For here about
the old Borough, where every stone means history and the "making of the
English people," there are faces of all types that England holds, but no
face yet seen carries any sense of merriment, or any good thing that
might bear its name. It is the burden of living that looks from dull
eyes and stolid faces, and a hopelessness, unconscious it may be but
always apparent, that better things may come. The typical Englishman, as
we know him, has but occasional place, and the mass, hurrying to and fro
in the midst of this roar of traffic, are thin and eager and restless of
countenance as any crowd of Americans in the same type of surroundings.
Innumerable little streets, each dingier and more sordid than the last,
open on either side. Hot coffee and cocoa cans are at every corner,
their shining brass presided over by men chiefly. Here, as throughout
East London, sellers of every sort of eatable and drinkable thing wander
up and down.

Paris is credited with living most of its life under all men's eyes, and
London certainly may share this reputation as far as eating goes. In
fact, working London, taking the poorest class both in pay and rank, has
small space at home for much cookery, and finds more satisfaction in the
flavor of food prepared outside. The throats, tanned and parched by much
beer, are sensitive only to something with the most distinct and
defined taste of its own; and so it is that whelks and winkles and
mussels and all forms of fish and flesh, that are to the American
uneatably strong and unpleasant, make the luxuries of the English poor.
They are conservative, also, like all the poor, and prefer old
acquaintances to new; and the costers and sellers of all sorts realize
this, and seldom go beyond an established list.

It is always "somethin' 'ot" that the workman craves; and small wonder,
when one has once tested London climate, and found that, nine months out
of twelve, fog and mist creep chill into bones and marrow, and that a
fire is comfortable even in July. November accents this fact sharply,
and by November the pea-soup and eel-soup men are at their posts, and
about market and dock, and in lane and alley, the trade is brisk. Near
Petticoat Lane, one of the oddest of London's odd corners, small
newsboys rush up and take a cupful as critically as I have seen them
take waffles from the old women purveyors of these delicacies about City
Hall Park and Park Row, while hungry costers and workmen appear to find
it the most satisfactory of meals.

One must have watched the eel baskets at Billingsgate, and then read the
annual consumption, before it is possible to understand how street after
street has its eel-pie house, and how the stacks of small pies in the
windows are always disappearing and always being renewed. It would seem
with eel pies as with oysters, of which Sam Weller stated his conviction
that the surprising number of shops and stalls came from the fact that
the moment a man found himself in difficulties he "rushed out and ate
oysters in reg'lar desperation." It is certain that some of the eaters
look desperate enough; but the seller is a middle-aged, quiet-looking
man, who eyes his customers sharply, but serves them with generous
cupfuls. The sharpness is evidently acquired, and not native, and he has
need of it, the London newsboys, who are his best patrons, being ready
to drive a bargain as keen as their fellows on the other side of the
sea. His stand is opposite a cat's-meat market, a sausage shop in
significant proximity, and he endures much chaffing as to the make-up
of his pea soup, which he sells in its season. But it is eels for which
the demand is heaviest and always certain, and the eel-soup man's day
begins early and ends late, on Saturdays lasting well into Sunday
morning. He is prosperous as such business goes, and buys four
"draughts" of eels on a Friday for the Saturday's work, a "draught"
being twenty pounds, while now and then he has been known to get rid of
a hundred pounds.

This stall, to which the newsboys flock as being more "stylish" than
most of its kind, is fitted with a cast-iron fireplace holding two large
kettles of four or five gallon capacity. A dozen pint bowls, or basins
as the Englishman prefers to call them, and an equal number of half-pint
cups, with spoons for all, constitute the outfit; and even for the
poorest establishment of the sort, a capital of not less than a pound is
required. This stall has four lamps with "Hot Eels" painted on them, and
one side of it is given to whelks, which are boiled at home and always
eaten cold with abundance of vinegar, of which the newsboy is prodigal.
At times fried fish are added to the stock, but eels lead, and mean the
largest profit on the amount invested.

Dutch eels are preferred, and the large buyer likes to go directly to
the eel boats at the Billingsgate Wharf and buy the squirming draughts,
fresh from the tanks in which they have been brought. To dress and
prepare a draught takes about three hours, and the daughter of the
stall-owner stands at one side engaged in this operation, cleaning,
washing, and cutting up the eels into small pieces from half an inch to
an inch long. These are boiled, the liquor being made smooth and thick
with flour, and flavored with chopped parsley and mixed spices,
principally allspice. For half a penny, from five to seven pieces may be
had, the cup being then filled up with the liquor, to which the buyer is
allowed to add vinegar at discretion. There is a tradition of one
customer so partial to hot eels that he used to come twice a day and
take eight cupfuls a day, four at noon and four as a night-cap.

The hot-eel season ends with early autumn, and pea soup takes its place,
though a small proportion of eels is always to be had. Split peas,
celery, and beef bones are needed for this, and it is here that the
cat's-meat man is supposed to be an active partner. In any case the
smell is savory, and the hot steam a constant invitation to the
shivering passers-by. This man has no cry of "Hot Eels!" like many of
the sellers.

"I touches up people's noses; 't ain't their heyes or their hears I'm
hafter," he says, though the neat stall makes its own claim on the
"heyes."

In another alley is another pea-soup man, one-legged, but not at all
depressed by this or any other circumstance of fate. He makes, or his
wife makes, the pea soup at home, and he keeps it hot by means of a
charcoal fire in two old tin saucepans.

"Hard work?" he says. "You wouldn't think so if you'd been on your back
seven months and four days in Middlesex Orspital. I was a coal heaver,
and going along easy and natural over the plank from one barge to
another, and there come the swell from some steamers and throwed up the
plank and chucked me off, and I broke my knee against the barge. It's
bad now. I'd ought to 'ad it hoff, an' so the surgeons said; but I
wouldn't, an' me wife wouldn't, and the bone keeps workin' out, and I've
'ad nineteen months all told in the 'orspital, and Lord knows how me
wife and the young uns got on. I was bad enough off, I was, till a
neighbor o' mine, a master butcher, told me there was a man up in Clare
Market, makin' a fortune at hot eels and pea soup, and he lent me ten
shillings to start in that line. He and me wife's the best friends I've
ever had in the world; for I've no memory of a mother, and me father
died at sea. My oldest daughter, she's a good un, goes for the eels and
cuts 'em up, and she an' me wife does all the hard work. I've only to
sit at the stall and sell, and they do make 'em tasty. There's no
better. But we're hard up. I'd do better if I'd a little more money to
buy with. I can't get a draught like some of the men, and them that gets
by the quantity can give more. The boys tells me there's one man gives
'em as much as eight pieces; that's what they calls a lumping
ha'p'worth. And the liquor's richer when you boils up so many eels.
What's my tin pot ag'in' his five-gallon one? There's even some that
boils the 'eads, and sells 'em for a farthing a cupful; but I've not
come to that. But we're badly off. The missus has a pair o' shoes, and
she offs with 'em when my daughter goes to market, and my boy the
youngest 's got no shoes; but we do very well, and would do better, only
the cheap pie shop takes off a lot o' trade. I wouldn't eat them pies.
It's the dead eels that goes into 'em, and we that handles eels knows
well enough that they're rank poison if they ain't cut up alive, and the
flesh of 'em squirming still when they goes into the boiling water. Them
pies is uncertain, anyway, whatever kind you buy. I've seen a man get
off a lot a week old, just with the dodge of hot spiced gravy poured out
of an oil can into a hole in the lid, and that gravy no more'n a little
brown flour and water; but the spice did it. The cat's-meat men knows;
oh, yes! they knows what becomes of what's left when Saturday night
comes, though I've naught to say ag'in' the cat's-meat men, for it's a
respectable business enough.

"I've thought of other ways. There's the baked-potato men, but the
'ansome can and fixin's for keeping 'em 'ot is what costs, you see.
Trotters is profitable, too, if you've a start, that is, though it's
women mostly that 'andles trotters, blest if I know why! I've a cousin
in the boiled pudding business--meat puddings and fruit, too;--but it's
all going out, along of the bakers that don't give poor folks a chance.
They has their big coppers, and boils up their puddings by the 'undred;
but I dare say there's no more need o' street-sellers, for folks go to
shops for most things now. She's in Leather Lane, this cousin o' mine,
and makes plum-duff as isn't to be beat; but she sells Saturday nights
mostly, and for Sunday dinners. Ginger nuts goes off well, but there
again the shops 'as you, and unless you can make a great show, with
brass things shining to put your eyes out, and a stall that looks as
well as a shop, you're nowhere. There's no chance for the poor anyhow,
it seems to me; for even if you get a start, there's always some one
with more money to do the thing better, and so take the bread out of
your mouth. But 'better' 's only more show often, and me wife can't be
beat for tastiness, whether it's hot eels or pea soup, and I'll say that
long as I stand."

So many small trades have been ruined by the larger shops taking them
up, that the street-seller's case becomes daily a more complicated one,
and the making a living by old-fashioned and time-honored methods almost
impossible. It is all part of the general problem of the day, and the
street-sellers, whether costers or those of lower degree, look forward
apprehensively to changes which seem on the way, and puzzle their
untaught minds as to why each avenue of livelihood seems more and more
barred against them. For the poorest there seems only a helpless, dumb
acquiescence in the order of things which they are powerless to change;
but the looker-on, who watches the mass of misery crowding London
streets or hiding away in attic and cellar, knows that out of such
conditions sudden fury and revolt is born, and that, if the prosperous
will not heed and help while they may, the time comes when help will be
with no choice of theirs. It is plain that even the most conservative
begin to feel this, and effort constantly takes more practical form;
but this is but the beginning of what must be,--the inauguration of a
social revolution in ideas, and one to which all civilization must come.




CHAPTER XIII.

WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES.


As investigation progresses, it becomes at times a question as to which
of two great factors must dominate the present status of women as
workers; competition, which blinds the eyes to anything but the surest
way of obtaining the proper per cent, or the inherited Anglo-Saxon
brutality, which, in its lowest form of manifestation, makes the English
wife-beater. It is certain that the English workingwoman has not only
the disabilities which her American sister also faces,--some inherent in
herself, and as many arising from the press of the present system,--but
added to this the apparent incapacity of the employer to see that they
have rights of any description whatsoever. Even the factory act and the
various attempts to legislate in behalf of women and child workers
strikes the average employer as a gross interference with his
constitutional rights. Where he can he evades. Where he cannot he is apt
to grow purple over the impertinence of meddling reformers who cannot
let well-enough alone.

Such a representative of one class of English employers is to be found
in a little street, not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, the great
newspaper centre, where all day long one meets authors, editors, and
journalists of every degree. Toward eight in the morning, as at the same
hour in the evening, another crowd is to be seen, made up of hundreds
upon hundreds of girls hurrying to the countless printing establishments
of every grade, which are to be found in every street and court opening
from or near Fleet Street. It is not newspaper interests alone that are
represented there. The Temple, Inner, Outer, and Middle, with the
magnificent group of buildings, also a part of the Temple's
workings--the new courts of law, have each and all their quota of law
printing, and a throng made up of every order of ability, from the
reader of Greek proof down to the folder of Mother Siegel's Almanac,
hurries through Fleet Street to the day's work.

In a building devoted to the printing and sending out of a popular
weekly of the cheaper order, the lower rooms met all requisitions as to
space and proper ventilation.

"We have nothing to hide," said the manager, "nothing at all. You may go
from top to bottom if you will."

This was said at what appeared to be the end of an hour or two of going
from room to room, watching the girls at work at the multitudinous
phases involved, and wondering how energy enough remained after twelve
hours of it, for getting home.

A flight of dark little stairs led up to a region even darker, and he
changed color as we turned toward them.

"This is all temporary," he said hastily. "We are very much crowded for
space, and we are going to move soon. We do the best we can in the mean
time. It's only temporary."

This was the reason for the darkness. Stumbling up the open stairs,
hardly more than a ladder, one came into a half story added to the
original building, and so low that the manager bowed his head as he
entered; nor was there any point at which he could stand freely
upright, this well-fed Englishman nearly six feet tall. For the girls
there was no such difficulty, and nearly two hundred were packed into
the space, in which folding and stitching machines ran by steam, while
at long tables other branches of the same work were going on by hand.
The noise and the heat from gas-jets, steam, and the crowd of workers
made the place hideous. The girls themselves appeared in no worse
condition than many others seen that day, but were all alike, pale and
anemic. Their hours were from 8 A. M. to 8 P. M., with an hour for
dinner, usually from one to two. The law also allows half an hour for
tea, but in all cases investigated, this time is docked if the girl
takes it. Cheap "cocoa rooms" are all about, where a cup of tea or cocoa
and a bun may be had for twopence; but even this is a heavy item to a
girl who earns never more than ten shillings ($2.50) a week, and as
often from four to seven or eight. No arrangement for making tea on the
premises was to be found here or anywhere.

"We mean to have a room," the employers said, "but we have so many
expenses attendant on the growing business that there doesn't seem any
chance yet."

This employer brought his wage-book forward and showed with pride that
several of his girls earned a pound a week ($5.00). But on turning back
some pages, the record showed only fourteen and sixteen shillings for
these same names, and after a pause the manager admitted that the pound
had been earned by adding night work.

This question of whether night work is ever done had been a most
difficult one to determine. The girls themselves declared that it often
was, and that they liked it because they got three shillings and their
breakfast; but the managers had in more than one case denied the charge
with fury.

"It's over-work," the present one said, his eyes on the rows of figures.

"When?" asked my companion quietly, and he burst into a laugh.

"You've got me this time," he said. "You've given your word not to
mention names, so I don't mind telling you. It's like this. There's a
new firm to be floated, and they want two hundred thousand circulars on
two days' notice. Of course it has to be night-work, and we put it
through, but we give the girls time for supper, and provide a good
breakfast, and there's hundreds waiting for the chance. But you've seen
for yourselves. Some of them make a pound a week. What in reason does a
woman want of more than a pound a week?"

This remark is the stereotyped one of quite two-thirds the employers,
whether men or women. The old delusion still holds that a man works for
others, a woman solely for herself, and although each woman should
appear with those dependent upon her in entire or partial degree
arranged in line, it would make no difference in the conviction. It is
quite true that many married women work for pocket-money, and having
homes, can afford to underbid legitimate workers. But they are the
smallest proportion of this vast army of London toilers, whose pitiful
wage is earned by a day's labor which happily has no counterpart in
length with us, save among the lowest grade of needlewomen.

In the case under present consideration pay for over-time was allowed
at the rate of fourpence an hour and a penny extra. If late five minutes
the workwoman is fined twopence, and if not there by nine is "drilled,"
that is, sent away, or kept waiting near until two, when she goes on for
half a day. If tardy, as must often happen with fogs and other causes,
she is often "drilled" for a week, though "drilling" in this trade is
used more often with men than with women, who are less liable to
irregularities caused by drink. In some establishments the bait of
sixpence a week for good conduct is offered, but this is deducted on the
faintest pretext, and the worker fined as well, for any violation of
regulations tacit or written.

In another establishment piece-work alone was done, a popular almanac
being folded at fourpence a thousand sheets. Railway tickets brought in
from eight to ten shillings a week, and prize packages of stationery,
fourpence a score, the folding and packing of prize doubling the length
of time required and thus lessening wages in the same ratio.

I have given phases of this one trade in detail, because the same
general rules govern all. The confectionery workers' wages are at about
the same rate, although a pound a week is almost unknown, the girls
making from three shillings and sixpence (84c.) to fourteen and sixteen
shillings weekly. A large "butter-scotch" factory pays these rates and
allows the weekly good-conduct sixpence which, however, few succeed in
earning. This factory is managed by two brothers who take alternate
weeks, and the younger one exacts from the girls an hour more a day than
the older one. Here the factory act applies, and inspectors appear
periodically; but this does not hinder the carrying out of individual
theories as to what constitutes a day. If five minutes late, sevenpence
is deducted from the week's wages, which begin at three and sixpence and
ascend to nine, the latter price being the utmost to be earned in this
branch of the trade.

In the cocoa rooms which are to be found everywhere in London where
business of any sort is carried on, the pay ranges from ten to twelve
shillings a week. The work is hard and incessant, although hours are
often shorter. In both confectionery factories and the majority of
factory trades, an hour is allowed for dinner, but the tea half hour
refused or deducted from time. London in this respect, and indeed in
most points affecting the comfort and well-being of operatives of every
class, is far behind countries, the great manufacturing cities of which
are doing much to lighten oppressive conditions and give some
possibility of relaxation and improvement. Some of the best reforms in a
factory life have begun in England, and it is thus all the more puzzling
to find that indifference, often to a brutal degree, characterizes the
attitude of many London employers, who have reduced wages to the lowest,
and brought profits to the highest, attainable point. It is true that he
is driven by a force often quite beyond his control, foreign
competition, French and German, being no less sharp than that on his own
soil. He must study chances of profit to a farthing, and in such study
there is naturally small thought of his workers, save as hands in which
the farthings may be found. Many a woman goes to her place of work,
leaving behind her children who have breakfasted with her on "kettle
broth," and will be happy if the same is certain at supper time.

"There's six of us have had nought but kettle broth for a fortnight,"
said one. "You know what that is? It's half a quarter loaf, soaked in
hot water with a hap'orth of dripping and a spoonful of salt. When
you've lived on that night and morning for a week or two, you can't help
but long for a change, though, God forgive me! there's them that fares
worse. But it'll be the broth without the bread before we're through.
There's no living to be had in old England any more, and yet the rich
folks don't want less. Do you know how it is, ma'am? Is there any chance
of better times, do you think? Is it that they _want_ us to starve? I've
heard that said, but somehow it seems as if there must be hearts still,
and they'll see soon, and then things'll be different. Oh, yes, they
must be different."

Will they be different? It is unskilled workers who have just spoken,
but do the skilled fare much better? I append a portion of a table of
earnings, prepared a year or two since by the chaplain of the
Clerkenwell prison, a thoughtful and earnest worker among the poor,
this table ranking as one of the best of the attempts to discover the
actual position of the workingwoman at present:--


     "Making paper bags, 4½_d._ to 5½_d._ per thousand; possible
     earnings, 5_s._ to 9_s._ a week. Button-holes, 3_d._ per dozen;
     possible earnings, 8_s._ per week.

     "Shirts 2_d._ each, worker finding her own cotton; can get six done
     between 6 A. M. and 11 P. M.

     "Sack-sewing, 6_d._ for twenty-five, 8_d._ to 1_s._ 6_d._ per
     hundred; possible earnings, 7_s._ per week.

     "Pill-box making, 1s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings,
     1_s._ 3_d._ a day.

     "Button-hole making, 1_d._ per dozen; can do three or four dozen
     between 5 A. M. and dark.

     "Whip-making, 1_s._ per dozen; can do a dozen per day.

     "Trousers-finishing, 3_d._ to 5_d._ each, finding own cotton; can
     do four per day.

     "Shirt-finishing, 3_d._ to 4_d._ per dozen."


So the list runs on through all the trades open to women. A pound a week
is a fortune; half or a third of that amount the wages of two-thirds the
women who earn in working London; nor are there indications that the
scale will rise or that better days are in store for one of these
toilers, patient, heavy-eyed, well-nigh hopeless of any good to come,
and yet saying among themselves the words already given:--

"There must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be
different. Oh, yes, they must be different."




CHAPTER XIV.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS.


It is but a narrow streak of silver main that separates the two
countries, whose story has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied
by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected to believe
that it understood the other. Not only the nation as a whole, however,
but the worker in each, is far from any such possibility; and the
methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time to come, a source
of bewilderment to the other. That conditions on both sides of the
Channel are in many points at their worst, and that the labor problem is
still unsolved for both England and the Continent, remains a truth,
though it is at once evident to the student of this problem that France
has solved one or two phases of the equation over which England is still
quite helpless.

There is a famous chapter in the history of Ireland, entitled "Snakes
in Ireland," the contents of which are as follows:--

"There are no snakes in Ireland."

On the same principle it becomes at once necessary in writing on the
slums of Paris, to arrange the summary of the situation: "There are no
slums in Paris."

In the English sense there certainly are none; and for the difference in
visible conditions, several causes are responsible. The searcher for
such regions discovers before the first day ends that there are none
practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one
finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime
might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot
where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is
absolutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be excepted in this
statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a
London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the East End
lives in a gloom for which there is neither outward nor inward
alleviation. Soot is king of the great city, and his prime ministers,
Smoke and Fog, work together to darken every haunt of man, and to shut
out every glimpse of sun or moon. The flying flakes are in the air.
Every breath draws them in; every moment leaves its deposit on wall and
floor and person. The neatest and most determined fighter of dirt must
still be bond slave to its power; and eating and drinking and breathing
soot all day and every day, there comes at last an acquiescence in the
consequences, and only an instinctive battle with the outward effects.

For the average worker, at the needle at least, wages are too low to
admit of much soap; hot water is equally a luxury, and time if taken
means just so much less of the scanty pay; and thus it happens that
London poverty takes on a hopelessly grimy character, and that the
visitor in the house of the workers learns to wear a uniform which shows
as little as possible of the results of rising up and sitting down in
the soot, which, if less evident in the home of the millionnaire, works
its will no less surely.

Fresh from such experience, and with the memory of home and work room,
manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the
cleanliness of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at
first a constant surprise. The French workwoman, even of the lowest
order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair
exterior whatever may be the interior condition, and she shares also in
the thrift which is equally a national possession, and the exercise of
which has freed France from the largest portion of her enormous debt.
The English workwoman of the lowest order, the trouser-stitcher or
bag-maker, is not only worn and haggard to the eye, but wears a uniform
of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which represent the extremity of
dejection. She clings to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of
respectability and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached a
point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of
flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint of ornamentation having long
ago yielded to weather and age and other agents of destruction. The
shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both being the badge of a
condition from which emergence has become practically impossible. These
lank figures carry no charm of womanhood,--nothing that can draw from
sweater or general employer more than a sneer at the quality of the
labor of those waiting always in numbers far beyond any real demand,
until for both the adjective comes to be "superfluous," and employer and
employed alike wonder why the earth holds them, and what good there is
in an existence made up simply of want and struggle.

Precisely the opposite condition holds for the French worker, who, in
the midst of problems as grave, faces them with the light-heartedness of
her nation. She has learned to the minutest fraction what can be
extracted from every centime, and though she too must shiver with cold,
and go half-fed and half-clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of
something better, and to-day is thus made more bearable. She shares too
the conviction, which has come to be part of the general faith
concerning Paris, which seems always an embodied assurance, that sadness
and want are impossible. Even her beggars, a good proportion of them
laboriously made up for the parts they are to fill, find repression of
cheerfulness their most difficult task, and smile confidingly on the
sceptical observer of their methods, as if to make him a partner in the
encouraging and satisfactory nature of things in general. The little
seamstress who descends from her attic for the bread with its possible
salad or bit of cheese which will form her day's ration, smiles also as
she pauses to feel the thrill of life in the thronging boulevards and
beautiful avenues, the long sweeps of which have wiped out for Paris as
a whole everything that could by any chance be called slum.

Even in the narrowest street this stir of eager life penetrates, and
every Parisian shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily
existence. If shoes are too great a luxury, the workwoman clatters along
in _sabots_, congratulating herself that they are cheap and that they
never wear out. Custom, long-established and imperative, orders that she
shall wear no head-covering, and thus she escapes the revelation bound
up in the London worker's bonnet. Inherited instinct and training from
birth have taught her hands the utmost skill with the needle. She makes
her own dress, and wears it with an air which may in time transfer
itself to something choicer; and this quality is in no whit affected by
the the cheapness of the material. It may be only a print or some
woollen stuff of the poorest order; but it and every detail of her dress
represent something to which the English woman has not attained, and
which temperament and every fact of life will hinder her attaining.

As I write, the charcoal-woman has climbed the long flights to the fifth
floor, bending under the burden of an enormous sack of _charbon à
terre_, but smiling as she puts it down. She is mistress of a little
shop just round the corner, and she keeps the accounts of the wood and
coal bought by her patrons by a system best known to herself, her
earnings hardly going beyond three francs a day. Even she, black with
the coal-dust which she wastes no time in scrubbing off save on Sundays
when she too makes one of the throng in the boulevards, faces the hard
labor with light-hearted confidence, and plans to save a sou here and
there for the _dot_ of the baby who shares in the distribution of
coal-dust, and will presently trot by her side as assistant.

In the laundry just beyond, the women are singing or chattering, the
voices rising in that sudden fury of words which comes upon this people,
and makes the foreigner certain that bloodshed is near, but which ebbs
instantly and peacefully, to rise again on due occasion. Long hours,
exhausting labor, small wages, make no difference. The best worker
counts from three to four francs daily as prosperity, and the rate has
even fallen below this; yet they make no complaint, quite content with
the sense of companionship, and with the satisfaction of making each
article as perfect a specimen of skill as can be produced.

Here lies a difference deeper than that of temperament,--the fact that
the French worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and counts its
satisfactory appearance as a portion of the reward. Slop work, with its
demand for speedy turning out of as many specimens of the poorest order
per day as the hours will allow, is repugnant to every instinct of the
French workwoman; and thus it happens that even slop work on this side
of the Channel holds some hint of ornamentation and the desire to lift
it out of the depth to which it has fallen. But it is gaining ground,
fierce competition producing this effect everywhere; and the always
lessening ratio of wages which attends its production, must in time
bring about the same disastrous results here as elsewhere, unless the
tide is arrested, and some form of co-operative production takes its
place. With the French worker in the higher forms of needle industry we
shall deal in the next chapter, finding what differences are to be met
here also between French and English methods.




CHAPTER XV.

FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS.


"Yes, it is the great shops that have done that, madame. Once, you saw
what was only well finished and a credit to the worker, and, even if the
reward was small, she had pride in the work and her own skill, and did
always her best. But now, what will you? The thing must be cheap,
cheapest. The machine to sew hurries everything, and you find the
workwoman sans ambition and busy only to hurry and be one with the
machine. It is wrong, all wrong, but that is progress, and one must
submit. When the small shops had place to live, and the great _magasins_
were not for ladies or any who wished the best, then it was different,
but now all is changed, and work has no character. It is all the same;
always the machine."

More than once this plaint has been made, and the sewing-machine
accused as the cause of depression in wages, of deterioration of all
hand needlework, and of the originality that once distinguished French
productions; and there is some truth in the charge, not only for Paris,
but for all cities to which needlewomen throng. Machinery has gradually
revolutionized all feminine industries in Paris, and its effect is not
only on the general system of wages, but upon the moral condition of the
worker, and family life as a whole has become to the student of social
questions one of gravest importance. On the one hand is the conviction,
already quoted, that it has brought with it deterioration in every phase
of the work; on the other, that it is an educating and beneficent agent,
raising the general standard of wages, and putting three garments where
once but one could be owned. It is an old story, and will give food for
speculation in the future, quite as much as in the past. But in talking
with skilled workers, from dressmakers to the needlewomen employed on
trousseaux and the most delicate forms of this industry, each has
expressed the same conviction, and this quite apart from the political
economist's view that there must be a return to hand production, if the
standard is not to remain hopelessly below its old place. Such return
would not necessarily exclude machinery, which must be regarded as an
indispensable adjunct to the worker's life. It would simply put it in
its proper place,--that of aid, but never master. It is the spirit of
competition which is motive power to-day, and which drives the whirring
wheels and crowds the counters of every shop with productions which have
no merit but that of cheapness, and the price of which means no return
to the worker beyond the barest subsistence.

Subsistence in Paris has come to mean something far different from the
facts of a generation ago. Wages have always been fixed at a standard
barely above subsistence; but, even under these conditions, French
frugality has succeeded not only in living, but in putting by a trifle
month by month. As the great manufactories have sprung up, possibilities
have lessened and altered, till the workwoman, however cheerfully she
may face conditions, knows that saving has become impossible. If, in
some cases, wages have risen, prices have advanced with them till only
necessities are possible, the useful having dropped away from the plan,
and the agreeable ceased to have place even in thought. Even before the
long siege, and the semi-starvation that came to all within the walls of
Paris, prices had been rising, and no reduction has come which even
approximates to the old figures. Every article of daily need is at the
highest point, sugar alone being an illustration of what the
determination to protect an industry has brought about. The London
workwoman buys a pound for one penny, or at the most twopence. The
French workwoman must give eleven or twelve sous, and then have only
beet sugar, which has not much over half the saccharine quality of cane
sugar. Flour, milk, eggs, all are equally high, meat alone being at
nearly the same prices as in London. Fruit is a nearly impossible
luxury, and fuel so dear that shivering is the law for all but the rich,
while rents are also far beyond London prices, with no "improved
dwellings" system to give the utmost for the scanty sum at disposal. For
the needlewoman the food question has resolved itself into bread alone,
for at least one meal, with a little coffee, chiefly chicory, and
possibly some vegetable for the others. But many a one lives on bread
for six days in the week, reserving the few sous that can be saved for a
Sunday bit of meat, or bones for soup. Even the system which allows of
buying "portions," just enough for a single individual, is valueless for
her, since the smallest and poorest portion is far beyond the sum which
can never be made to stretch far enough for such indulgence.

"I have tried it, madame," said the same speaker, who had mourned over
the degeneration of finish among the workwomen. "It was the siege that
compelled it in the beginning, and then there was no complaining, since
it was the will of the good God for all. But there came a time when
sickness had been with me long, and I found no work but to stitch in my
little room far up under the roof, and all the long hours bringing so
little,--never more than two and a half francs, and days when it was
even less; and then I found how one must live. I was proud, and wished
to tell no one; but there was an _ouvrière_ next me, in a little room,
even smaller than mine, and she saw well that she could help, and that
together some things might be possible that were not alone. She had her
furnace for the fire, and we used it together on the days when we could
make our soup, or the coffee that I missed more than all,--more, even,
than wine, which is for us the same as water to you. It was months that
I went not beyond fifty centimes a day for food, save the Sundays, and
then but little more, since one grows at last to care little, and a good
meal for one day makes the next that is wanting harder, I think, than
when one wants always. But I am glad that I know; so glad that I could
even wish the same knowledge for many who say, 'Why do they not live on
what they earn? Why do they not have thrift, and make ready for old
age?' Old age comes fast, it is true. Such years as I have known are
double, yes, and treble, and one knows that they have shortened life.
But when I say now 'the poor,' I know what that word means, and have
such compassion as never before. It is the workers who are the real
poor, and for them there is little hope, since it is the system that
must change. It is the middleman who makes the money, and there are so
many of them, how can there be much left for the one who comes last, and
is only the machine that works?

"All that is true of England, and I have had two years there, and thus
know well; all that is true, too, here, though we know better how we can
live, and not be always so _triste_ and sombre. But each day, as I go by
the great new shops that have killed all the little ones, and by the
great factory where electricity makes the machines go, and the women too
become machines,--each day I know that these counters, where one can buy
for a song, are counters where flesh and blood are sold. For, madame, it
is starvation for the one who has made these garments; and why must one
woman starve that another may wear what her own hands could make if she
would? Everywhere it is _occasions_ [bargains] that the great shops
advertise. Everywhere they must be more and more, and so wages lessen,
till there is no more hope of living; and, because they lessen, marriage
waits, and all that the good God meant for us waits also."

On the surface it is all well. There is less incompetency among French
than English workers, and thus the class who furnish them need less
arraignment for their lack of thoroughness. They contend, also, with one
form of competition, which has its counterpart in America among the
farmers' wives, who take the work at less than regular rates. This form
is the convent work, which piles the counters, and is one of the most
formidable obstacles to better rates for the worker. Innumerable
convents make the preparation of underwear one of their industries, and,
in the classes of girls whom they train to the needle, find workers
requiring no wages, the training being regarded as equivalent.
Naturally, their prices can be far below the ordinary market one, and
thus the worker, benefited on the one hand, is defrauded on the other.
In short, the evil is a universal one,--an integral portion of the
present manufacturing system,--and its abolition can come only from
roused public sentiment, and combination among the workers themselves.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE CITY OF THE SUN.


It is only with weeks of experience that the searcher into the under
world of Paris life comes to any sense of real conditions, or discovers
in what directions to look for the misery which seldom floats to the
surface, and which even wears the face of content. That there are no
slums, and that acute suffering is in the nature of things impossible,
is the first conviction, and it remains in degree even when both misery
and its lurking-places have become familiar sights. Paris itself, gay,
bright, beautiful, beloved of every dweller within its walls, so
dominates that shadows seem impossible, and as one watches the eager
throng in boulevard or avenue, or the laughing, chattering groups before
even the poorest café, other life than this sinks out of sight. The most
meagrely paid needlewoman, the most overworked toiler in trades,
indoors or out, seizes any stray moment for rest or small pleasures, and
from a half-franc bottle of wine, or some pretence of lemonade or sugar
water, extracts entertainment for half a dozen. The pressure in actual
fact remains the same. Always behind in the shadow lurks starvation, and
there is one street, now very nearly wiped out, known to its inhabitants
still as "_la rue où l'on ne meurt jamais_"--the street where one never
dies, since every soul therein finds their last bed in the hospital.
This is the _quartier_ Mouffetard, where bits of old Paris are still
discernible, and where strange trades are in operation; industries which
only a people so pinched and driven by sharp necessity could ever have
invented.

The descent to these is a gradual one, and most often the women who are
found in them have known more than one occupation, and have been, in the
beginning at least, needlewomen of greater or less degree of skill.
Depression of wages, which now are at the lowest limit of subsistence,
drives them into experiments in other directions, and often failing
sight or utter weariness of the monotonous employment is another cause.
These form but a small proportion of such workers, who generally are a
species of guild, a family having begun some small new industry and
gradually drawn in others, till a body of workers in the same line is
formed, strong enough to withstand any interlopers.

"What becomes of the women who are too old to sew, and who have never
gained skill enough to earn more than a bare living?" I asked one day of
a seamstress whose own skill was unquestioned, but who, even with this
in her favor, averages only three francs a day.

"They do many things, madame. One who is my neighbor is now scrubber and
cleaner, and is happily friends with a '_concierge_,' who allows her to
aid him. That is a difficulty for all who would do that work. It is that
the '_concierges_,' whether men or women, think that any pay from the
'_locataires_' must be for them; and so they will never tell the tenant
of a woman who seeks work, but will say always, 'It is I who can do it
all. One cannot trust these from the outside.' But for her, as I say,
there is opportunity, and at last she has food, when as '_couturière_'
it was quite--yes, quite impossible. There was a child, an idiot--the
child of her daughter who is dead, and from whom she refuses always to
be separated, and she sews always on the sewing-machine, till sickness
comes, and it is sold for rent and many things. She is proud. She has
not wished to scrub and clean, but for such work is twenty-five centimes
an hour, and often food that the tenant does not wish. At times they
give her less, and in any case one calculates always the time and
watches very closely, but for her, at least, is more money than for many
years; sometimes even three francs, if a day has been good. But that is
but seldom, and she must carry her own soap and brush, and pay for all.

"That is one way, and there is another that fills me with terror,
madame, lest I, too, may one day find myself in it. It is last and worst
of all for women, I think. It is when they wear '_le cachemire
d'osier_.' You do not know it, madame. It is the chiffonieress basket
which she bears as a badge, and which she hangs at night, it may be, in
the City of the Sun. _Voila_, madame. There are now two who are on their
way. If madame has curiosity, it is easy to follow them."

"But the City of the Sun? What is that? Do you mean Paris?"

"No, madame. It is a mockery like the '_cachemire d'osier_.' You will
see."

It is in this following that the polished veneer which makes the outward
Paris showed what may lie beneath. Certainly, no one who walks through
the Avenue Victor Hugo, one of the twelve avenues radiating from the Arc
de Triomphe, and including some of the gayest and most brilliant life of
modern Paris, the creation of Napoleon III. and of Baron Haussman, would
dream that hint of corruption could enter in. The ancient Rue de la
Révolte has changed form and title, and the beautiful avenue is no
dishonor to its present name. But far down there opens nearly
imperceptibly a narrow alley almost subterranean, and it is through this
alley that the two figures which had moved silently down the avenue
passed and went on; the man solid and compact, as if well-fed, his face
as he turned, however, giving the lie to such impression, but his keen
alert eyes seeing every shade of difference in the merest scrap of
calico or tufts of hair. For the woman, it was plain to see why the
needle had been of small service, her wandering, undecided blue eyes
passing over everything to which the man's hook had not first directed
her.

Through the narrow way the pair passed into a sombre court, closed at
the end by a door of wood with rusty latch, which creaks and objects as
one seeks to lift it. Once within, and the door closed, the place has no
reminder of the Paris just without. On the contrary, it might be a bit
from the beggars' quarter in a village of Syria or Palestine, for here
is only a line of flat-roofed huts, the walls whitewashed, the floors
level with the soil, and the sun of the warm spring day pouring down
upon sleeping dogs, and heaps of refuse alternating with piles of rags,
in the midst of which work two or three women, silent at present, and
barely looking up as the new comers lay down their burdens. A fat yet
acrid odor rises about these huts, drawn out from the rags by the
afternoon heat; yet, repulsive as it is, there is more sense of
cleanliness about it than in the hideous basements where the same trade
is plied in London or New York. There is a space here not yet occupied
by buildings. The line of huts faces the south; a fence encloses them;
and so silent and alone seems the spot that it is easy to understand why
it bears its own individual name, and to the colony of _chiffoniers_ who
dwell here has long been known as the City of the Sun. Doors stand open
freely; honesty is a tradition of this profession; and the police know
that these delvers in dust heaps will bring to them any precious object
found therein, and that he who should remove the slightest article from
one of these dwellings would be banished ignominiously and deprived of
all rights of association.

These huts are all alike; two rooms, the larger reserved for the bed,
the smaller for kitchen, and in both rags of every variety. In the
corner is a heap chiefly of silk, wool, and linen. This is the pile from
which rent is to come, and every precious bit goes to it, since rent
here is paid in advance,--three francs a week for the hut alone, and
twenty francs a month if a scrap of court is added in which the rags can
be sorted. On a fixed day the proprietor appears, and, if the sum is not
ready, simply carries off the door and windows, and expels the unlucky
tenant with no further formality. How the stipulated amount is scraped
together, only the half-starved _chiffoniers_ know, since prices have
fallen so that the hundred kilogrammes (about two hundred pounds) of
rags, which, before the war, sold for eighty francs, to-day bring
precisely eight.

"In a good day, madame," said the woman, "we can earn three francs. We
are always together, I and my man, and we never cease. But the dead
season comes, that is, the summer, when Paris is in the country or at
the sea; then we can earn never more than two francs, and often not more
than thirty sous, when they clean the streets so much, and so carry away
everything that little is left for us. It is five years that I have
followed my man, and he is born to it, and works always, but the time is
changed. There is no more a living in this, or in anything we can do. I
have gone hungry when it is the sewing that I do, and I go hungry now,
but I am not alone. It is so for all of us, and we care not if only the
children are fed. They are not, and it is because of them that we
suffer. See, madame, this is the child of my niece, who came with me
here, and has also her man, but never has any one of them eaten to the
full, even of crusts, which often are in what we gather."

The child ran toward her,--a girl three or four years old, wearing a
pair of women's shoes ten times too large, and the remainder of a
chemise. Other clothing had not been attempted, or was not considered
necessary, and the child looked up with hollow eyes and a face pinched
and sharpened by want, while the swollen belly of the meagre little
figure showed how wretched had been the supply they called food. All day
these children fare as they can, since all day the parents must range
the streets collecting their harvest; but fortunately for such future as
they can know, these little savages, fighting together like wild
animals, have within the last twenty years been gradually gathered into
free schools, the work beginning with a devoted woman, who, having seen
the City of the Sun, never rested till a school was opened for its
children. All effort, however, was quite fruitless, till an old
_chiffonier_, also once a seamstress, united with her, and persuaded the
mothers that they must prepare their children, or, at least, not prevent
them from going. At present the school stands as one of the wisest
philanthropies of Paris, but neither this, nor any other attempt to
better conditions, alters the fact that twelve and fourteen hours of
labor have for sole result from thirty to forty sous a day, and that
this sum represents the earnings of the average women-workers of Paris,
the better class of trades and occupations being no less limited in
possibilities.




CHAPTER XVII.

DRESSMAKERS AND MILLINERS IN PARIS.


"If a revolution come again, I think well, madame, it will be the great
shops that will fall, and that it is workwomen who will bear the torch
and even consent to the name of terror, _pétroleuses_. For see a moment
what thing they do, madame. Everywhere, the girl who desires to learn as
_modiste_, and who, in the day when I had learned, became one of the
house that she served, and, if talent were there, could rise and in time
be mistress herself, with a name that had fame even,--that girl must now
attempt the great shop and bury her talent in always the same thing. No
more invention, no more grace, but a hundred robes always the same, and
with no mark of difference for her who wears it, or way to tell which
may be mistress and which the servant. It is not well for one or the
other, madame; it is ill for both. Then, too, many must stand aside who
would learn, since it is always the machine to sew that needs not many.
It is true there are still houses that care for a name, and where one
may be _artiste_, and have pride in an inspiration. But they are rare;
and now one sits all day, and this one stitches sleeves, perhaps, or

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